Tag: Sarah Rockwell

Join Dr. Sarah Rockwell for her presentation at the Redwood Region Audubon Society January 16 at 7:00 p.m.

Written by Elva Manquera on January 13, 2025. Posted in Klamath Call Note, Trips & Events.

Purple Martin pair on snag credit Lorelle Sherman

Join the Redwood Region Audubon Society on Thursday, January 16 at 7:00 p.m. for a program entitled “To Southern California, Brazil, and Back: First GPS Tracking of Oregon Vesper Sparrow and Western Purple Martin Migration” by Sarah Rockwell. One of the biggest challenges in identifying ways to help migratory birds is that we don’t know where they are most of the year. Without this basic information, it is challenging to identify and prioritize conservation actions. Archival, lightweight GPS tags placed on small songbirds have been available for about a decade, and they are revolutionizing our understanding of bird migration and migratory connectivity. The Klamath Bird Observatory (KBO), along with partners at USFS, USGS, Cape Arago Audubon, and Avifauna Northwest, is using these GPS tags to track the migratory routes and overwintering locations of both Oregon Vesper Sparrow and Western Purple Martin, two imperiled subspecies unique to the Pacific Northwest. These are the first studies with these subspecies—the first to track them with GPS technology year-round! These birds have returned with fascinating information, revealing discoveries about their incredible journeys, including unexpected lengthy fall stopovers, and for Purple Martins, winters on the beach in southeastern Brazil. In this talk, Sarah will share photos and maps from this research, and give a peek into the amazing window we now have into the incredible voyages these birds undertake.

Dr. Sarah Rockwell is a Senior Research Biologist at KBO, where she manages several research programs studying the ecology of bird species of conservation concern, and monitoring birds at riparian, oak, and coniferous restoration sites. Sarah manages KBO’s Oregon Vesper Sparrow research program, studying nest success, survival, and habitat needs to better understand the causes of their decline and potential conservation actions. Sarah joined KBO in 2013 after completing her PhD at the University of Maryland and Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, where she studied the ecology of the then-endangered Kirtland’s Warbler in her home state of Michigan. She earned her BA in Biology in 2002 from Kalamazoo College, where she fell in love with birds during her study abroad experience in Ecuador. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, with her husband and four-year-old daughter.

Programs are held at Six Rivers Masonic Lodge, 251 Bayside Road, Arcata, or via the Zoom link. Drinks and goodies are served at 7:00 p.m., the program begins at 7:30.

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82255170040?pwd=ZFNjenlrcFQ2QTh1SFY4RUhpOWZvQT09

Finding Oregon Vesper Sparrows: A Vital Census in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument

Written by Elva Manquera on December 17, 2024. Posted in Klamath Call Note, Birds & Birding, Conservation, KBO Science.

Why look for Oregon Vesper Sparrows?

It is estimated that only 3,000 individuals of this declining subspecies remain. The small population size of the Oregon Vesper Sparrow is well-documented, but the causes of its at-risk status are not. As with all migratory birds, population trends may be caused by factors on their breeding grounds, wintering grounds, or migration stopover areas.

Since 2018 Klamath Bird Observatory has been trying to understand the cause of this subspecies’ decline. Getting a snapshot of how many of these birds there are in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument – and where they are – is important baseline data. This information will be especially important if the Oregon Vesper Sparrow is listed as federally endangered or threatened – it is currently in review with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for potential listing under the Endangered Species Act.

How many Oregon Vesper Sparrows live in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument?

This past summer, it was KBO’s goal to find out. Armed with paper maps, Avenza maps, GPS units, and binoculars, we bumped down endless back roads and completed the most rigorous inventory in the Monument to date. This included >7000 acres of potential montane meadow habitat, including some sizeable meadows that had never before been surveyed for Oregon Vesper Sparrows. We were interested in the bird’s abundance and distribution, and recording which meadows were occupied by this declining, at-risk subspecies. KBO surveyors spent many hours this summer hiking in steep terrain, getting our boots wet in the dewy grass, counting sparrows on transect surveys, and recording their locations on maps.

A picture of one of the field sites on the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument taken by field technician Lin Stern.

We surveyed 54 montane meadows in the Monument, mostly on public lands, and counted 140 Oregon Vesper Sparrows in 27 of them. Because this survey method is most likely to detect singing males (and most of those males will have mates), and there are also meadows on private property within the Monument that we could not survey, this number is almost certainly an underestimate. A striking finding was that there were more Oregon Vesper Sparrows than we thought, with many in quite small subpopulations scattered across meadows of varying sizes (some as small as 17 acres) all throughout the Monument. Only five meadows had 10 or more individuals detected; 75% of occupied sites had only 1-5 individuals. This is in addition to the three big meadows with the highest abundance of Oregon Vesper Sparrows just outside of the Monument – Owen’s Meadow, Lower Vesper Meadow, and Lily Glen – which have 30-50 pairs each. We now know that the Monument supports a substantial number of Oregon Vesper Sparrows, probably at least 10% of the global population which is estimated to be about 3,000 individuals.

We enjoyed the opportunity to visit all of these remote corners of our local Monument! It’s a wonderful resource to have in our collective “backyard” with a considerable diversity of habitats, including the montane meadows that support Oregon Vesper Sparrows and other grassland creatures. We are currently writing up a report to share our findings, and their conservation implications, with local BLM staff tasked with managing the Monument.

Editor’s Note: Funding for 2024 research activities was provided by the BLM National Conservation Lands Management Studies Support Program and Oregon Wildlife Foundation. KBO Field Technicians Lin Stern, Elijah Hayes, and Nate Trimble, and staff Sarah Rockwell and Sam Webb conducted surveys in the field.

Click here to learn more about the work Klamath Bird Observatory is doing around the Oregon Vesper Sparrow.

If you want to support this work, you can use this link to donate: https://klamathbird.org/product/donate/

Tracking Post-Fledging Survival

Written by Elva Manquera on October 28, 2024. Posted in Klamath Call Note, KBO Science.

A new research paper published in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology by partners Bob Altman and Joel Geier and KBO scientist Sarah Rockwell presents the first estimates of post-fledging survival and site persistence of the Oregon Vesper Sparrow. The authors used mark-resight methodology, a method involving color-banding birds and observing them in the wild, to track the survival of fledglings in the weeks after they left their nests in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. The authors found that their survival estimates, derived from mark-resighting, were substantially higher than those found in previous studies using radio-tracking in other grassland songbirds. Post-fledging survival of Oregon Vesper Sparrows in the Willamette Valley was the highest ever reported for similarly sized grassland birds – 62.9% for the first nine weeks out of the nest, typically the most vulnerable time in a bird’s life. These differences may be due to either the naturally high survival of this subspecies in this region or a negative impact of radio-tracking on birds, particularly on fledglings, including entanglement and increased predation risk.

The paper concludes by acknowledging the greater effort needed for mark-resight methodology, but recommending it when possible as a less invasive and potentially more accurate alternative to radio-tracking for studying post-fledging survival in grassland birds, especially species of conservation concern. Post-fledging and juvenile survival are important pieces of information to estimate the population growth rate and extinction risk for this subspecies. The Oregon Vesper Sparrow is currently under review for listing as federally threatened or endangered, and the results presented in this paper will help the USFWS make this decision.

Oregon Vesper Sparrow habitat in the Willamette Valley. Photo taken by Bob Altman.

This study is a part of range-wide research on the imperiled Oregon Vesper Sparrow that KBO is conducting with the above-mentioned partners in the Willamette Valley, OR, and Ecostudies Institute in the Puget Lowlands, WA. Juvenile return rates at KBO’s field site on Howard Prairie are nowhere near as high as in the Willamette Valley – but this doesn’t necessarily mean that mortality is higher. It could mean that our young birds are more likely to disperse to other meadows than return to our study site. This is an important question in understanding the demography and possible causes of population decline in this subspecies and is an active area of research.

The study was funded primarily by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, with additional support from the American Bird Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Multi-State State Wildlife Grant Program, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Birds Program, Oregon Wildlife Foundation, Wildlife Forever Fund, and Greenbelt Land Trust.

Citation:
Altman, B., J. Geier, and S. M. Rockwell. 2024. High post-fledging survival and site persistence using mark-resight methodology for Oregon Vesper Sparrows in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. Avian Conservation and Ecology 19(2):8. https://doi.org/10.5751/ACE-02706-190208

You can read the full article here: https://ace-eco.org/vol19/iss2/art8/

KBO tracks the first Oregon Vesper Sparrows!

Written by Elva Manquera on February 26, 2024. Posted in Klamath Call Note.

Written by Dr. Sarah Rockwell

The unique Oregon subspecies of Vesper Sparrow, roughly estimated at just 2,000 birds, is of conservation concern. It is currently under review for listing under the Endangered Species Act because of its small population size and declining trend. One of the biggest challenges in identifying ways to help migratory species is the fact that we don’t know where they are for most of the year. Vesper Sparrows breeding in Oregon are only here for about half the year, from mid-April to early October. Because different subspecies of Vesper Sparrow mix on the wintering grounds in California and are not visually distinguishable, until now, we only had a rough idea of where Oregon Vesper Sparrows spend the non-breeding months. This study will help answer questions essential for future conservation efforts – where are these birds going during migration and winter, and what challenges might they face there?

To address this critical knowledge gap, we expanded KBO’s ongoing Oregon Vesper Sparrow research to include using miniaturized archival GPS tags to track the migration of sparrows breeding in the Rogue Basin. In 2020, we captured 10 males via target-netting at our Lily Glen study site, color-banded them, and deployed GPS tags using a leg-loop harness attachment (for more details and photos of this process, see here ). In 2021, we located and recaptured four of these birds to retrieve tags and stored data. Three of the tags successfully recorded these individuals’ fall migration and/or wintering locations; one also contained the spring migration track!

Non-breeding season movements have never been tracked in this subspecies before, and results from these first three birds are incredibly interesting in their variation. You may have already followed the adventures of Po, Gram, and Affy in our recent series of Facebook posts, where we learned where they traveled during migration, but we will recap the highlights here and below in a video. One male (Po; in green) departed Lily Glen on Sept 19 on what appears to be a “false start” migration attempt – he spent one night about 25 km southwest of Tule Lake and then headed right back to Lily Glen – a behavior that we hadn’t recorded before, and in fact, would have been nearly impossible to observe without the GPS tag data. He left Lily Glen again on Sept 24 and sped down to his wintering grounds in just two days. This was also the only individual for whom we also captured spring migration – Po left his overwintering area on the evening of Apr 9, made two short stopovers just east of Vina, CA, and Redding, CA, and was back setting up his territory at Lily Glen by Apr 15.

Another male (Gram, in blue) left Lily Glen on Sept 19 and spent two weeks on an extended fall stopover outside of Chico, CA, before arriving at his wintering grounds in October. A third male (Affy; in pink) chose a more westerly route and had multiple short fall stopovers, including at Sutter Butte, an interesting geological formation made of eroded volcanic lava domes outside of Yuba City that provides a habitat island in the highly developed Central Valley. Unfortunately, Affy’s GPS tag stopped functioning mid-October, so we do not know his final wintering location. The two birds we have wintering locations for (Po and Gram) spent the winter near Raymond, CA, and El Rancho, CA, in what appears to be oak savannah habitat in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

This study is the first to identify precise migratory stopover sites and overwintering areas used by this imperiled subspecies, and it addresses a critical information gap for future conservation efforts. So far, it seems like the Oregon Vesper Sparrows are using grassland and oak savannah habitat in the foothills east and west of the Central Valley as a stopover and overwintering habitat and avoiding the heavily agricultural Central Valley. We retrieved additional GPS tags in 2023, and after analyzing the data, we will use this information to assess whether conservation actions are warranted at non-breeding sites.

The Bureau of Land Management, Carpenter Foundation, Oregon Conservation and Recreation Fund, and Oregon Wildlife Foundation supported this GPS-tracking work.

Video: https://youtu.be/wKNi96ffKAY

Cover photo: Oregon Vesper Sparrow (c) Frank Lospalluto

Vesper Sparrow Video Premiere

Written by Elva Manquera on September 22, 2022. Posted in Klamath Call Note, Conservation, KBO Science, Press Room, Trips & Events.

Photo was taken at Lilly Glen of an Oregon Vesper Sparrow by Frank Lospalluto.

Join Klamath Bird Observatory and Vesper Meadow Education Program for the premiere of the short film “From the Field – A Study of the Oregon Vesper Sparrow” by Daniel Thiede. We will hear from Program Director Jeanine Moy about the restoration work and connection to the community being done at Vesper Meadow. Then Dr. Sarah Rockwell will give a brief talk about the research KBO is conducting on the Oregon Vesper Sparrow, followed by a short walk in Vesper Meadow to a Motus node. The afternoon will conclude with a showing of the film, with time afterward for discussion and questions. Come learn about this little brown bird and experience one of the beautiful places it calls home!

Refreshments and light appetizers are included. Dress for the weather as this event will take place outside at Vesper Meadow and in an open-sided barn. Wear sturdy walking shoes if you plan to join the walk.

This event is hosted at Vesper Meadow and will be from 4 pm – 6 pm on October 10th. This event is limited by the number of attendees. Register below to reserve your spot.

Klamath Bird Observatory follows CDC guidelines. KBO events are being offered with COVID-19 safety as KBO’s primary concern. Proof of vaccination will be required for all in-person participants. All individuals attending an event must also fill out the Waiver of Liability form that will be emailed to you once you register for the event. Paper copies will be available at the event. Please do not attend the event if you are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. Masks are not required but wear based on comfortability.

Vesper Sparrow Stephens flipped cropped (72dpi 11x17)

Coming this Field Season: Oregon Vesper Sparrow and Technology

Written by Elva Manquera on April 21, 2022. Posted in Klamath Call Note, Conservation, KBO Science, Press Room.

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.

Oregon Vesper Sparrow (c) Frank Lospalluto

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.