Tracking Adirondack birds’ winter journeys

How tracking Southern destinations can help boost conservation efforts

By Chloe Bennett

A collection of bird songs sweetens time spent outdoors during Adirondack summers. Now with fall just weeks away, many species are on the cusp of migration. Birders who wonder where their backyard companions go in the winter can easily find out through a new map. 

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s shared stewardship maps, initially started by the conservation network Partners in Flight, show where there are wintering concentrations of birds that breed within a given region. One of the lab’s maps highlights birds in the Blue Line:

The primary goal of the project isn’t to provide a visual aid to birders but to show how conservation in one region can benefit another. Andrew Stillman, a postdoctoral fellow with the lab, and Archie Jiang, a research technician collaborated on the maps. 

“Where are those birds going in the winter?” Stillman, who is also a fellow with the university’s Atkinson Center for Sustainability, asked. “And how can we work together with organizations in those non-breeding grounds to help conserve birds together?”

The researchers identified 12 bird species that have at least 1% of their global breeding population in the Adirondacks, including:

• broad-winged hawk
• yellow-bellied sapsucker
• blue-headed vireo
• red-eyed vireo
• Bicknell’s thrush
• ovenbird
• Blackburnian warbler
• chestnut-sided warbler
•  black-throated green warbler
• Canada warbler
• scarlet tanager

The Caribbean and the northern Andes have a strong connection to Adirondack birds. In Central America, the Five Great Forests provide critical habitat for the feathered creatures, Stillman said. 

“I think the thing that’s encouraging about this is that it highlights how our birds are shared and there’s incredible efforts happening in Central and South America to conserve biodiversity, and these linkages show us that those efforts also benefit the breeding birds that breed in our own backyards,” he said. “So, it’s neat to see how even across these really big geographic areas, birds are one of the things that connects us.”

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Bicknell’s thrush, a medium-sized brown bird, is linked to the Caribbean and is listed as a species of special concern by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. It depends on cool temperatures in high mountaintop habitats, an environment that is changing with global warming. 

“As the climate warms, Bicknell’s thrush get crushed higher and higher up these mountains resulting in less suitable land area for them to breed,” Stillman said. “So this is a species that’s facing what people call sometimes ‘the escalator to extinction.’”

Since 2007, the species has declined in the Adirondacks, according to information compiled through the lab’s vast eBird database, which is powered by citizen scientists. 

Nature observers who submit information on species like Bicknell’s thrush power research and conservation efforts, Stillman said. Without the world of birders and the eBird information they provide, the maps would not exist.

“We’ve only scratched the surface of the science that’s possible when hundreds of thousands of people work together, and I think these maps are a good example of that,” he said.