Birders celebrate 5 years of Manitoba Breeding Bird Atlas

Birders gathered by the flock Friday in Winnipeg to celebrate five years of tracking themovements ofManitobas breeding birds.

The Manitoba Breeding Bird Atlas,anambitious five-year project that enlistedthe efforts of novice birders, citizen scientists and bird biologists alike in an attempt torecord and map the presence and distribution of Manitobas birds, just wrapped its final season.

Biologist, Bird Studies CanadaManitobaprogram managerand atlas coordinator ChristianArtuso was excited, if not surprised, of the project's resounding success.

To be honest, I didnt think it was possible when I first came here, to do something of this magnitude," said Artuso. "There were a lot of naysayers when we tried to build it back in 2009 when we were in our preparation. We proved that its doable, even in Manitoba."

40,000 hours in the field

Over five years, a smallarmy of observers logged nearly 40,000 hours of time in the field chasing down the province's feathered friends.In that time, more than 300,000 observations were recorded, many "lifers" checked off volunteers' life lists.

'Lifer': A birder's first sighting of a given bird species

When I first came to Manitoba I would say there was only a handfulof birders in the province," saidArtuso.

"In the end we got over 1,000 people to register for the breeding bird atlas, we did lots ofworkshopsalong the way, we trained people, webroughtin people fromoutside [the province], we did some summer job-type divisions as well, field crews, butmostly just lots and lots of volunteers.

The image rising out of all of this data tells an interesting story about Manitoba's bird diversity and breeding habits.

Artusois giving himself and others involved a yearto pore over all of that data, with the intention of making the end product readily accessible to the public through the project's website.

These reports and maps will showthings like the relative abundance, probability of occurrence, and general distribution of species across Manitoba.

Birders of all stripes

Atlas participants camefrom a variety of backgrounds and skill levels.

There are some people who literally are just contributing from their back yard, but there are others who are travelling widely and identifying hundreds of species of birds and doing it by ear as well as by sight, and everything in between, said Arutso.

Professionals like Artuso who have anencyclopedic knowledge of birdscan rely mainly on their ears to identify species by their distinctive songs.

This auditoryskill takes years of practice to build. Countless hours must be spent listening to recordings of bird song,studying the varied repertoires of some species,thelittle inflections and jazzy renditions of others.

The professionals involved with the atlas spent much of their time performing "point counts," where an observer sets off to a sample area, stands or sits in silence for three or five minutes and records the species and number of individual birds they hear (or see) singing.

Novices that got their start volunteering with the atlasat one point likely had a hard timedifferentiatingbetween the peeps and whistles of a black-capped chickadee, a common year-round resident in Manitoba, and the gentle squeaks of a steaming teakettle.

But in going out into the field with seasoned birders,Artusosaid he'swatched many beginners grow their passion and skills through experience and workshops provided by atlas organizers.

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The nature of observations recorded by less experienced birders were classified as "casual," usually denoting those observations made by contributors in their back yards or neighbourhoods. Those somewhere in the intermediate range visited sample areas and,in a more systematic way, would've headed out looking for evidence (sightings, nests, etc.)of breeding birds.

Rarities spotted

In five years, atlas contributorsdocumented five confirmed cases of species breeding in the province for the first time.

Western tanagers, black-headed grosbeaks, snowy egrets, long-tailedjaegers, and Missippikites were all confirmed Manitobabreeders between 2010-2014. (See gallery for photos of Western Tanager and black-headed grosbeak.)

But it was the kite sightings this summer that got the lion's share of media coverage.

The Mississipi kite made a bit of a splash in the media, said Artuso.

The breeding pair of kites set up shop in the vicinity of Wellington Crescent this summer. The precise location of the nest was never revealed to try to stemwhat was already a steady stream of binocular-toting onlookers coming through the area trying to steal a glance of the rare birds.

The Mississippi kite's northernmost range follows the Mississippi River usually no farther north than Illinois or Iowa. In this case, the birds were way outside of their usual breeding territory.

Atlas'ers alsofound a few golden eagles breeding in the province forthe first time in around a hundred years.

Why 5 years?

Manitoba's atlas was designed as a five-year project, with the summer of 2014 asits final season.

Its short enough to be a snap shot in time of what the birds are doing, to show what their status is, and its long enough to get the job done," said Artuso.

Of course, getting all of the data recorded in two or three years would be preferable.

"But in Canada youre never going to get the job done in two to threeyears, said Artuso.

Getting to some parts of Manitoba posed a real challenge.

Artuso said Canada has its work cut out for it due its expansive landscapes. In places likethe U.S., the sampling areas for similar projects aresmaller, and with greater population density, naturally theres more birders lending their ears and binoculars to the cause.

Developing Manitoba's atlasmeant dividing the province into a grid of10-kilometre by 10-kilometre squares, with 7,000 squares in total across Manitoba.

This has been done in other provinces, its been done twice in Ontario, in British Columbia, in the maritime provinces, but those are situations where theres more people and smaller areas," said Artuso.

Despite the geographical challenges, project volunteers visited and sampled all ofthe targetareas starting in 2010,the provincial and federal government at times helping totransport observers into remote parts of the province by plane or helicopter.

Powerful tool

Artuso said hishope is that the birding community continues doing five-year projects like this one every 20 years.

"The idea is you revisit them," said Artuso. "Once youve done this four or five times with 20 years in between, then you have a super powerful tool to really assess what is going on."

In Manitoba theres been bird surveys going on for a long time, in the south more so than in the north, but there really wasnt anything comprehensive until now.

Species-at-risk assessment in Manitoba has relied on expert opinion rather than the preponderance of evidence in the past, said Artuso. With the atlas, researchers now have a very meaningful baseline."

Going forward with species-at-risk assessment or understanding changes to species distributions in the province with respect to things like climate change, the baseline established by the atlas will help the scientific community make more powerful policy suggestions to government aimed at protecting Manitoba birds.

The atlas and citizen science

Artuso said the atlas stands as animportant example of what can be achieved through collaborative efforts between scientists and the community.

"Its getting harder and harder, for example, for governments to take the responsibility for both monitoring and conserving. It really is imperative that the citizenry is actively engaged and aware of that process. I think citizen science is doing just that: its engaging people.

Citizen science is the way forward. The more people that get involved in the process of assessing environmental change, the more people are aware aware because of their active role, and the better we are in the long run in terms of how we interact with our environment and how well we do the job of keeping the planet healthy.