BIRD NERDS

CITIZEN SCIENTISTS SAFEGUARD AVIAN DIVERSITY

WORDS & PHOTOS

ART

LOGAN WAGNER LAURIAN QUEZADA

look up. you miss a lot when you don’t look up. You miss even more when you don’t listen to your surroundings. All too often we rush through our days with our heads down, and the natural world passes through our fingertips. If you listen closely on campus, you can hear the songs of house finches, shrill sounds of cedar waxwings and even the trumpeting of sandhill cranes passing overhead.

Birds are some of the easiest critters to observe. They are ubiquitous. Horned larks, meadowlarks and mountain bluebirds litter the north desert. Ravens, robins and black-chinned hummingbirds

A spotted towhee awaits a response to his morning song perched atop a pollen-loaded Utah juniper.

OPPOSITE:

inhabit campus grounds. It goes without mentioning the cacophony of diversity within the Colorado River corridor. Grand Junction, despite its semi-arid high desert status, still supports a wealth of diversity, especially in birds.

Decorating the water, land and skies of the Western Slope are 349 unique avian species. Shy of that total are 151 playable animated characters that make up the Pokédex in the original Pokémon game. Pokémon gameplay is how birders feel outside. If you have spent any time in tall grass, you’ll see a character. Sometimes they flee before you can identify them and add them to your list. It’s exciting to see new birds, and different habitats lead to different species. Many birders feel driven to “catch them all,” compiling a life list of birds they have ever seen.

“[I tune in] with my ears and my eyes, anytime I'm outside, because I always feel like, baseline, I'm going to see birds. I'm going to hear birds. I may not have my binoculars, but I'm going to know they're there. It's just sort of another layer of awareness that you take with you as you become a birder,” Cary Atwood, chapter leader of Grand Valley Audubon Society (GVAS), said.

Since 1870, naturalists with a knack for birds have joined structured counts alongside 450 (and counting) Audubon Society chapters around the nation. These seasonal and annual counts paint a picture of what kinds of birds are present at any given time of year. GVAS held their 48th Christmas Bird Count in December 2019. Out birding that day were 15 groups divided around the Grand Valley, and two groups were in rafts floating the icy Colorado River. In total, 107 different bird species were counted among the groups.

“I've been doing the Christmas Bird Count now for probably five

A blue heron fishes in a river-fed pond.

ILLUSTRATION:

"I tune in with my ears and my eyes, anytime I'm outside, because I always feel like, baseline, I'm going to see birds. I'm going to hear birds. I may not have my binoculars, but I'm going to know they're there. It's just sort of another layer of awareness that you take with you as you become a birder." — Cary Atwood

years," said Stephanie Matlock, birder and Colorado Mesa University biology professor. "And that's a classic citizen science thing, because there's a group of us — we're not experts — and we're out there counting as best as we can. And then they try to look at patterns over the years with how things are different from one year to the next and which birds are missing and which ones are increasing.”

Along with organized counts, dozens of birders (and the bird-curious) in Grand Junction create useful lists whenever they go out and submit detailed digitized lists to Ebird.

“Ebird, run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is the largest citizen science project or effort worldwide. Thousands of checklists every month are submitted from all over the world. It's incredible,” Atwood said.

Lists of bird species and numbers contribute to a more accurate picture of where the birds go, whether it’s further north due to climate changes or out of existence completely from being out-competed, eaten by predators or inundated by human development.

With definitive numbers on species and individuals,

Audubon Society chapters and Ebird contributors provide data that can be tracked from year to year on the diversity of birds in their areas as well as quantities of species populations. These counts in particular can show that western meadowlarks, a songbird that nests in grasslands, now subsist on one quarter of their population from the 1970s. However, belted kingfishers, who rely on wetlands, have doubled in population, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Science about the decline of North American avifauna. These statistical results can show how human activities, both beneficial and detrimental, have directly affected bird populations.

The GVAS is the caretaker of 57 acres near Connected Lakes State Park called the Audubon Nature Preserve. Already in the works is another volunteer-driven restoration project reclaiming 13 acres of land parallel to the last portion of the Redlands Power Canal into shallow wetlands, which hopes to strengthen the populations of resident wetland birds like the belted kingfisher and provide resources for a plethora of migratory birds.

There are more migratory birds that travel through North America than anywhere else in the world. As such, every piece of used habitat contributes toward a more treacherous flight path for the birds. Habitat, and specifically food sources, become farther and farther between.

On top of our human expansion and reduction of untouched land, many people don’t feed birds. “Nobody feeds birds in this town when I've been on the bird counts before. It's a long stretch before you finally find somebody who's feeding birds,” Matlock said.

With a reduction of food resources and a heightened competition with invasive Eurasian species, diversity plummets.

Naturalists can agree that the loss of the passenger pigeon is lamented.

“There are declines in songbirds and it sucks. It does," Atwood said. "I know I feel like, ‘dang, why wasn't I a birder back in the 70s?’ I would have loved to have been alive when passenger pigeons were still around, but then you can go to places like Delta and look at 3 to 4,000 cranes. Seeing those kinds of spectacles is just incredible, but avian decline is just another part of our changing world, and birds matter.” It is hugely important to protect the spectacles we still have and cherish them while we still can. ▪

Invasive European starlings (right) often out-compete native species like the killdeer (left) for resources like food and nesting areas.

ILLUSTRATION:

RIGHT

Along a stretch of river cobbles on the Colorado River, a breeding pair of killdeer chase each other. Killdeer are the most common of the plover family in the Grand Valley.