• Charles Nilon, University of Missouri
• Paige Warren, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Rock Pigeon

The BES Bird Monitoring Project is a breeding bird survey designed to find out what birds are found in the breeding season in Baltimore and where. Our monitoring efforts will show associations among block group socioeconomic variables, land cover, land use, and habitat features with breeding bird abundance, to provide information for land managers on possible consequences of land use changes on bird communities.
 
A distinguishing feature of the bird monitoring at BES LTER, relative to other urban bird work, is the capacity for long-term monitoring of features at multiple scales through links to other parts of the project. Different processes influence habitat for birds at different scales, e.g. ongoing household level human decision-making at lot scale vs. block or neighborhood scale abandonment/re-development. Our project seeks to understand how these processes impact bird occurrence, abundance, and composition differ at the lot, block and neighborhood scale.

We conducted a pilot study employed a grid with 500m spacing. We surveyed 50 randomly selected points from the grid. In addition, we surveyed birds in 50 small parks, stratified using PRIZM classification of the surrounding census block groups. From analysis of these data, we determined the abundance and distribution of 46 bird species.

Sampling Points Illustration by Charlie Nilon

Rock Pigeon Mean Detections / Census Point