It’s All About the Habitat

Earlier this year, a pair of Common Ravens began nest prospecting atop light poles in my local Target parking lot. Ravens are uncommon birds in the Washington, D.C., area so this was quite a surprise to me. Ultimately the birds didn’t stay around, but their appearance got me thinking….

That same parking lot plays host to groups of postbreeding Laughing and Ring-billed Gulls in late summer, and Eastern Kingbirds call from the surrounding wires. The occasional Cooper’s Hawk or even Peregrine Falcon will streak through the nearby neighborhoods between the auto parts store and McDonald’s.

Recent research that many of our members participated in (thank you!) let us know that your number-one bird conservation concern is habitat loss. We agree! ABC has worked successfully with partners across the Americas to conserve and improve habitat for birds, to the tune of more than 8.6 million acres. But after considering those parking lot birds, I began to think about habitat a bit differently. It occurred to me that even the most extreme version of habitat conversion — literally Joni Mitchell’s “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”— does not leave “zero” habitat for birds. Just ask those Laughing Gulls. In truth, habitat is rarely completely “lost;” it just changes from one type to another. Granted, one type may be very severely degraded like that parking lot, and it may no longer be suitable for birds that are exacting in their requirements, but it is not completely lost. So, it occurs to me that it is the degree of degradation that really matters most. And that’s where things get more complex. Your feedback told us that overall, many of you are less concerned about cat predation on birds and the impact of wind energy development than about habitat loss itself. ABC recognizes, however, the unfortunate reality that poorly sited wind turbines do negatively impact habitat for bird species of concern, and in the broadest sense, we must also consider cat predation an aspect of habitat degradation, even if it’s not outright loss. For example, some parks in South Florida might look like attractive habitat but be deadly for birds due to high numbers of feral cats; some of the birds attracted to these habitats will never leave in one piece. Other drivers of habitat degradation are even harder to detect: Mosquitoes carrying avian malaria in the forests of Hawai'i are a more lethal and insidious form of degradation than even cats or wind turbines.

Perhaps our survey questions should have been more nuanced to acknowledge the connection between human-caused threats and degraded habitat. After all, what good is habitat if it is hostile to birds? I'd suggest

that conserving habitat needs a comprehensive and holistic approach — it is definitely about more than intact vegetation. In fact, those logging clear cuts that look so ugly from the road can flourish into habitat for declining species such as the Prairie Warbler in just a few years, and even the flat roofs of commercial buildings can provide habitat for Least Terns and Common Nighthawks, two species of conservation concern.

What’s the take away here? For me, it’s that habitat conservation is complex, and nuanced, and often less straightforward than it may appear on the surface. It’s critical to take a holistic look at what is degrading habitat in any given area, to ensure that bird conservation can advance and that birds themselves are able to recover. That degradation can be caused by paving the habitat over, but also by building wind facilities in the wrong places, allowing feral cats to proliferate, or by applying pesticides — and a variety of other threat factors. Instead of looking at habitat and threats as existing independently, we could envision a bird habitat gradient ranging from highly impacted on the one hand to pristine or barely impacted on the other.

In fact, this integration of our habitat conservation work and the threats that degrade these habitats — from free-roaming cats and wind turbines to glass collisions — is now underway at ABC. Our teams that work to reduce bird mortality are now embedded within our North American regional programs in the Northwest, Great Lakes and Northeast, Southeast, Central, and Southwest. We believe that by helping birds reproduce successfully through the maintenance or creation of high-quality habitat, and reducing mortality in these places among both juvenile and adult birds, we can provide the best possible bird conservation programs with the most likelihood of success.

I look forward to reporting on our progress in future issues of Bird Conservation, including updates on how this work is enhancing our BirdScapes approach to migratory bird conservation (see birdscapes.org).

Thank you very much for supporting ABC!

Sincerely,

Michael J. Parr President