In northern Minnesota, tracking songbirds to help them thrive in a changing forest
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In early August, Ryan Steiner and Reid Siebers were bushwhacking through a thick patch of forest in northeastern Minnesota, hot on the tail of an elusive, threatened songbird called a veery. Siebers leads the way, holding a big radio antenna in front of him.
The pair works for the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where Steiner is an avian ecologist. Fifteen days earlier, he had placed tiny transmitters, about the size of a large grain of rice, on the backs of several veeries shortly after they had hatched.
The researchers have spent their summer tracking rare, threatened songbirds through this small patch of forest in northern Minnesota — where, unlike most other habitats the species has lived in the country, they seem to be thriving — to identify the habitat the small songbirds rely on after they hatch.
“We’ll be able to say, within this general habitat, what exactly did the bird like?” Steiner said.
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They hope that by better understanding the birds’ early behavior, they can then help land managers create the kind of forest these birds need to survive into the future.
Each of the veeries’ tiny backpack-like transmitters emits a different signal. As Steiner and Siebers hike through the brush, an electronic reading on a telemetry unit they carry let them know when they’re creeping close to the bird.
The woods here are dense — a mix of aspen, maple and birch. Wild raspberries and other shrubs cover the forest floor. Bird calls carry through the treetops, but it’s almost impossible to see any birds.
"We joke in some of the Minnesota forests on some of the surveys we do that you might hear 50 species of birds in a day — 60, even, if you have a really good day — but you might not see any of them,” said Steiner. “It's just so thick out here."
Steiner has a bushy beard and covers his head with a hooded sweatshirt to protect him from mosquitoes as he tromps through the north woods.
He’s traveled the world researching birds, and the veery is one of his favorites — especially its song.
"To me, it sounds like a waterfall,” he said. “It's sort of this cascading swirl. These, really beautiful clear notes.”
This time of year, though, the veery are quiet. So Steiner has to rely on the telemetry unit to get him close. Then he relies on his eyes.
Standing still, he spies a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye. “There’s something moving down there,” Steiner said, pulling binoculars to his eyes. "It just jumped up into this little clump of alder."
It’s a veery, practically invisible through the leaves, the size and shape of a small robin, with cinnamon-brown feathers.
“If we didn't have a transmitter, you could walk right past this thing and have no idea,” he said.
They tie a bright pink flag to the tree where they see the veery hiding. The next day, they'll come back and document all the trees and shrubs and bugs in the area where they spied the bird — a microhabitat.
The goal is to identify what forest characteristics the birds prefer after they hatch but before they migrate: “What age is the forest? What types of trees are there?” Steiner said.
Helping young birds survive
Across the U.S, birds like the veery that rely on young forests for their breeding grounds — what scientists call "early successional" habitat — are struggling to survive because of changes in land management.
Another bird that Steiner is tracking, the tiny golden-winged warbler, has lost two thirds of its population in the past half-century. It's the fastest-declining songbird in North America.
But in northern Minnesota, songbirds that need these younger forests appear to be prospering.
Since the late 1990s, UMD researchers have monitored songbird populations on forest land managed by the Blandin Paper Co. in Itasca County.
They’ve found that the birds prefer a mosaic of habitat — a patchwork of logged areas, mature forests and wetlands spread throughout the forest — similar to the habitats that wildfires, wind storms, or flooding caused by beaver dams would have created naturally.
But until now, researchers have only been able to estimate bird populations by counting the calls of male birds that sing to mark their territory.
For the past two summers, scientists have taken that research to the next level, by tracking three species of birds — the veery, the golden-winged warbler and the woodcock — to examine the microhabitats the birds use and what forest characteristics they like best.
“That way, hopefully, when we do harvest some of the trees out here, we can create habitat that's ideal for these three declining bird species,” Steiner said.
Outfitting the birds with transmitters has allowed scientists for the first time to see how well young birds are surviving. Before then, it had been almost impossible to track them once they left the nest.
“You can have as many nests as you want, but if the juveniles aren't surviving to a point where they can be independent of their parents and really start feeding themselves, moving around the forest safely, and preparing for migration, we're never going to add to the population,” said Alexis Grinde, who manages the avian ecology research program at NRRI.
And those first few days out of the nest can be treacherous. Only about one percent of all birds survive their first year. Many don't even survive long enough to begin their migration.
"Something that I think a lot of people don't realize necessarily is that when these birds leave the nest, they can't actually fly at all,” Steiner said. “They sort of flutter."
He said that's why it's critical to identify what kinds of habitat they need where they nest, before they begin their long migration journey to South America.
“If we want to reverse the declines on these species, the only place we can do that is here, because this is the only place that you're adding birds to the population,” Steiner said.
Veery, in particular, have very low nest success rates, Steiner said. This summer, researchers found 29 nests. Birds in only eight of those nests survived long enough to fledge, when they grow feathers and can fly. The rest were taken by predators, from garter snakes and ravens, to squirrels and chipmunks.
“You sort of think of chipmunks as being these cute little animals with their cheeks stuffed full of seeds, but they're actually pretty vicious nest predators,” Steiner said.
So to help veery in particular, Steiner said they are looking for the specific characteristics of the forest landscape where they built nests that survived.
After they crunch the data this winter, they plan to advise land managers, like Blandin, or the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, on ways to harvest timber that also benefit birds.
“It's a pretty tough world out here for these little guys,” Steiner said. “We’re trying to make it a little less tough.”
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