It's summer... ironically, the slow season here. I've been rooting around for interesting topics, and....
...my inbox runneth over.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, a friend of mine, Lynn Schofield, has headed off to the Sierra for a few months of field work with Black-backed Woodpeckers. She visited as she was getting ready to head out, and it seemed like it might be interesting to get some dispatches from the field. I couldn't post last week's because of various complications, so you get a double dose this week to start things off:
I’m a native Minnesotan and a true Midwesterner. I grew up amidst deciduous forests and thunderstorms. I tend to get nervous when I drive by a controlled burn smouldering in the sagebrush alongside the highway, and when I’m tired I still pronounce my ‘o’s like they do in the movie Fargo. Mountains are something relatively new to me. It was birds that led me out to The West for the first time in my late teens, and it’s what keeps drawing me back. This summer the species that has brought me to the Sierra Nevadas is the Black-Backed Woodpecker, a fire specialist.
As its scientific name, Picoides arcticus, would suggest, this is a bird usually found much further north than California’s Sequoia National Forest where I’ll be spending most of my season. The High Sierras form an island of habitat where many of California’s management indicator species (MIS), including Pine Martens, Great Grey Owls, and my Black-Backed Woodpeckers are at the most austral portion of their range (Sierra Forest Legacy.) Because it is at the edges of a species’ range that they disappear first (Brown et al.), these typically northern species make ideal indicators in this region. Latitude plays a significant role in the presence of these woodpeckers even within the Sierra population (Saracco et al.)
The Black-Backed Woodpecker became the MIS for burned habitats in the Pacific Southwest region in 2008, and my employers, The Institute for Bird Populations, has been establishing a long-term monitoring strategy since then (Siegel et al.) Four years into the study, and there remains a lot to learn about the species and this ecosystem. Burn areas are an important habitat to monitor because they have been so misunderstood in the past. The traditional Smokey-the-Bear approach to forest management, where the goal was to suppress all fires, neglected those plants and animals that thrive in burned areas and those that depend on fire for their survival. The idea that burned forest is ruined habitat also made the practice of salvaging lumber from burned and downed trees very widespread, but cavity nesters such as woodpeckers and owls depend on that dead wood (DeBano et al.) It’s only been in the past decade or so that burn habitats have become fully appreciated.
Although high-elevation stands of charred conifers aren’t the forests I grew up with, it hasn’t taken long for me to fall in love. A week into the season, and I can already appreciate the beauty of the fires. The new growth that comes in the wake of a forest fire feels to me like the most lively and vibrant part of the woods I’m traveling through. The Black-Backed Woodpeckers are a dynamic bird and a great symbol of this habitat.
In the coming weeks, I will be using this space share with you some of my notes, sketches and observations from the field. Hopefully I can do justice to all the wonderful things I am seeing, hearing, and experiencing.
Brown, James H., George C. Stevens and Dawn M. Kaufman. “The Geographic Range: Size, Shape, Boundaries, and Internal Structure”. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics
Vol. 27, (1996), pp. 597-623
DeBano, Leonard F., Daniel G. Neary,Peter F. Ffolliott. Fire's Effects on Ecosystems. John Wiley and Sons inc. 1998.
Kotliar, Natasha B., Sallie J. Hejl, Richard L. Hutto, Victoria A. Saab, Cynthia P. Melcher, and Mary E. McFadzen. “Effects of Fire and Post Fire Salvage Logging on Avian Communities in Conifer-Dominated Forests of the Western United States”. Studies in Avian Biology No. 25:49-64, 2002.
"It takes more than fire to kill an oak or to make woodpecker habitat." (field sketch by Lynn Schofield)
If work hadn't been... well, the way work sometimes is, I would have joined a friend to go visit Lynn this past week. It would have been fun to put places and bird faces with these stories. Perhaps before her season is up... Anyway, here's this week's dispatch:
So, what is woodpecker habitat?
I’ve spent a lot of my life being lost in the backwoods of California, so I’ve spent a relatively large amount of time examining maps of California. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of seemly pleasant places with names like Hell’s Canyon, Mt. Diablo, or The Reservoir of Pain. I think I finally understand this naming convention, having stumbled upon my own Scree-slope of Suffering. Placed right outside the El Portal entrance of Yosemite, this area is absolutely gorgeous until something like a woodpecker survey compels you to climb up the crumbling sides of the canyon. It wasn’t just the battle against poison oak and gravity that made this survey terrible, but also the conclusion I had come to before even starting my day that this hot, charred scree-slope in the oak-dominated Sierra Foothills was not a place for Black-backed Woodpeckers.
Therein lies the difficulty. What really is Black-backed Woodpecker habitat? General woodpecker wisdoms says burned areas. My observations say high elevation with a lot of mid-sized fir and pine, and judging by the Sibley Guide’s range map, the epicenter of their environment should be typified by Northern Saskatchewan. After two weeks of woodpecker chasing, I can already affirm that all of this is correct, more or less. Their preferred habitat in California is where you’d be most likely to trick yourself into believing you’re in a Canadian conifer forest, but no matter how high you climb, the Southern Sierra Nevadas isn’t Saskatoon. Their usual habitat model doesn’t apply down here, and just searching where they should be won’t tell you where they really are. As an official indicator species and a candidate for the endangered list, it is important that their real habitat use is known and that we are not just working from assumptions.
Although they are a loud, showy bird, Black-backed Woodpeckers have a way of slipping under the birder-radar. They are conspicuously absent in passive bird counts when every bird observed from designated survey points is dutifully recorded (“point counts” for those of you in the world of professional birding.) Despite a dearth of Black-backeds recorded on point counts, these same spots will be clamoring with woodpeckers the moment they hear a recording of a would-be competitor. Just because somebody hasn’t seen them in that God-forsaken slope before, doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
So, should I have been so pessimistic about the canyon outside of El Portal and it’s sun-baked Live Oak and Gray Pine habitat? Maybe. We didn’t find anything that day. On the other hand, we did find a single individual at another low elevation site near King’s Canyon, perhaps compensating for his terrible territory by hanging onto a lot of it. We’ve also come across Black-backs in places that are virtually unburned, completely contrary to what they are supposed to do. Who knows where else they might surprise us. That’s why we’re looking. I try to remember that when I’m knee-deep in poison oak, but I’m still on guard for that "Hell-for-Sure Pass" that I recently noticed near one of my sites.
ps: Also, I want to add the addendum that I recently finished a 20-something mile backcountry jaunt into the Gorge of Despair through the Tehipite Valley, and it was positively lovely. I'd recommend the hike.
Lynn is pretty sure she'll have Sunday off and will try to stop in here. Got questions?
[Update - 10:30 am: Lynn is here now in the comments - not sure how long she'll be around.]