Coming this Field Season: Oregon Vesper Sparrow and Technology
Spring has sprung, and migratory birds are making their way back to the Klamath Siskiyou Bioregion. Klamath Bird Observatory (KBO) is preparing by dusting off field gear, mapping out survey sites, and hiring summer staff. Each staff member has their own favorite thing to look forward to this field season: starting a new project, expanding an active project, or wrapping up data collection.
Dr. Sarah Rockwell, one of KBO’s Research Biologists, is excited to be expanding the Oregon Vesper Sparrow GPS tracking project. KBO will be deploying more tags at our Lily Glen study site near Howard Prairie. Sarah will also be training partner Bob Altman with the American Bird Conservancy to expand the study and place GPS tags on Oregon Vesper Sparrows in the Willamette Valley this summer. KBO will look at the Willamette birds’ migratory routes and overwintering areas, and compare them to the data KBO has gathered from birds in the Rogue Basin.
This summer KBO will also continue to deploy MOTUS tags on late-stage Oregon Vesper Sparrow nestlings. In previous years, very few juveniles have returned to the same meadow where they were hatched. To investigate this, Sarah will be putting MOTUS nodes out in new meadows surrounding past sites, expanding her search for these birds.
Sarah is wrapping up collecting resight data for the Oregon Vesper Sparrow this summer – by resighting individually color-banded birds year after year, she can analyze their annual survival. KBO has also studied the sparrows’ nest success and habitat preferences in past years. The vegetation characteristics of sites where the sparrows choose to place their nests could be used to encourage land managers to plant beneficial vegetation. Other partners are collecting parallel data in the Willamette Valley, OR, and Puget Lowlands, WA, for similar use. The Oregon Vesper Sparrow is under review to potentially be added to the federally threatened and endangered species list, and Sarah hopes these data will help contribute to a decision.
This summer Science Director Jaime Stephens is excited about the ongoing Oregon Vesper Sparrow project. “KBO has been focusing our field research on this species for nearly a decade. A challenging part of science is that it can take a long time to gather the necessary data. In the next two years, KBO expects to have results available from this project that could be very impactful. These include nest success and breeding season habitat relationships, and as that wraps up we are moving on to MOTUS and GPS tagging to study non-breeding season movements. We are finishing an exciting part and moving on to an even more exciting part of the project.”
To learn more about the Oregon Vesper Sparrow and KBO’s conservation science projects click here. “Coming this Field Season” is a blog series highlighting the different projects that KBO staff are working on this summer. Subscribe to the blog and follow us on Facebook and Instagram to be notified of the next article.