KBO Science

The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument lies at the heart of a unique ecological landscape less than 20 miles outside of KBO’s home in Ashland, OR. This summer, with the support of the Medford BLM, KBO initiated a new long-term monitoring study which aims to understand the bird communities within the oak and grassland habitats in the Monument.

When playing at home, sports teams usually benefit from home-field advantage. A similar advantage exists among migratory birds that return to the same nesting site year after year to find familiar surroundings, food, and neighbors. The act of returning to the same site—site fidelity—has been documented in songbirds during nesting season for decades; however, what has remained a mystery is whether or not songbirds exhibit a similar site fidelity after the breeding season, during their annual molt, or replacement of feathers.

Oregon Vesper Sparrows are a declining and at-risk subspecies unique to the Pacific Northwest. This June, KBO staff spent time in the field placing miniature GPS tags on Oregon Vesper Sparrows to discover their migratory routes and wintering grounds. We thought you might be interested in the process!

Plucky, beautiful and declining in numbers at about a 2% annual rate, the Rufous Hummingbird makes its long annual migration in different timing and route patterns based the birds’ age and sex, new research by Oregon State University shows. The findings, published in the journal Avian Conservation & Ecology, are important because the more that is known about how Rufous Hummingbirds migrate, the more that can be done to ensure birds of each age and sex category have the resources they need each year on their journey up and down the western part of North America.

In a new publication selected as “editor’s choice” in the journal Landscape Ecology, researchers from Oregon State University’s Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society and Klamath Bird Observatory tested a novel species-centered technique for quantifying the influence of habitat amount and fragmentation on a community of 48 common bird species in Oregon’s Rogue Basin, including 25 oak-woodland specialists. Rather than using human-classified land-cover data, the species-centered technique uses stacked species-distribution models to quantify habitat amount and configuration. The results suggest that using this species-centered approach to define habitat for entire bird communities reveals relationships between fragmentation and bird diversity that would otherwise be obscured by the use of classified land-cover.

From a hummingbird’s point of view, wildfire can be good or bad. With support from the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station and WHP, Dr. Deborah M. Finch from the Research Station collaborated with Dr. Alexander and his research team at Klamath Bird Observatory in Oregon and with Dr. Sarahy Contreras from the University of Guadalajara – CUCSUR to complete a literature review about the effects of wildfire on hummingbird habitat, how restoration actions including prescribed fire affect those habitats, and how hummingbirds respond.

While we miss being in the field with all of our partners, this year KBO is honoring our long-standing WMBD connections in this new virtual way. Here, our staff share highlights from our work to meet Partners in Flight and North American Bird Conservation Initiative conservation priorities. Please, have a safe and healthy World Migratory […]

World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD) is an annual awareness-raising campaign highlighting the need for the conservation of migratory birds and their habitats. WMBD is global in reach and serves as an effective way to help raise awareness about the threats faced by migratory birds, their ecological importance, and the need for international cooperation to conserve […]

We hope that this message finds you, our community, in good health and in safe places during this unprecedented time of Covid-19. We are happy to report that we remain safe and healthy, and will continue to operate in the midst of this pandemic.