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U.S. Fish & Wildlife Provides Grant to Track Species of Greatest Concern in Northeast

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A Wood Thrush with an attached radio-transmitting nanotag, banded and tagged at Rushton Woods Preserve last summer. Photo by Blake Goll

WILLISTOWN, PA (APRIL 20, 2020) — A major grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) will enable a research partnership that includes the Willistown Conservation Trust in Chester County, Pennsylvania, along with a number of state agencies and nonprofit organizations, to dramatically expand a revolutionary new migration tracking system across New York and New England.

The grant, totaling $998,000, has been awarded to a partnership led in part by the Northeast Motus Collaboration (northeastmotus.com), which includes the Willistown Conservation Trust; the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in Dauphin County; Project Owlnet, a nationwide cooperative research initiative; and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve in Westmoreland County.

The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department is the lead agency, along with the Pennsylvania Game Commission, Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game, and the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Other partners include New Hampshire Audubon, Massachusetts Audubon and Maine Audubon.

The grant will allow the partners to establish 50 automated telemetry receiver stations in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine. These receivers will track the movements of bird, bats and even large insects tagged with tiny radio transmitters called nanotags — so named because they are tiny enough to be placed on migrating animals as small as monarch butterflies and dragonflies. The receiver array will be part of the rapidly expanding Motus Wildlife Tracking System (motus.org), established in 2013 by Bird Studies Canada, which already includes nearly 900 such stations around the world.

Together, the combination of highly miniaturized transmitters — some weighing just 1/200th of an ounce — and a growing global receiver array allows scientists to track migrants previously too small and delicate to tag with traditional transmitters, like a gray-cheeked thrush that made a remarkable 46-hour, 2,200-mile non-stop flight from Colombia to Ontario.

Gray-cheeked Thrush banded at Rushton Woods Preserve last spring. Photo by Blake Goll.

This is the second major USFWS grant for Motus expansion that the Northeast Motus Collaboration has received. In 2018, the agency awarded the collaboration about $500,000 to build 46 receiver stations in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. The collaboration had already constructed a 20-receiver array across Pennsylvania in 2017 using private, foundation and state grant funds.

Besides significantly increasing the telemetry infrastructure across the Northeast, this new USFWS grant specifically targets several species of greatest conservation need in New England. Research collaborators will use nanotag transmitters to study the migration routes, timing and behavior of American kestrels, the region’s smallest falcon and a bird that has experienced drastic and largely unexplained declines across New England.

An American Kestrel nestling being banded by Hawk Mountain scientists as part of their nestbox project in Pennsylvania. Photo by Blake Goll.

Other scientists will use the smallest nanotags to track the movements of monarch butterflies from the region, which have also suffered large population declines, but about whose migration little is known. The tracking information will help conservation agencies map the best areas to target for land conservation and habitat improvement, like encouraging the planting of milkweed for monarch caterpillars. Finally, researchers will also conduct testing to better understand the detection limits of newly developed versions of this new technology.

Monarch butterfly on asters. Photo by Blake Goll
Swamp Milkweed, a native host plant for Monarch butterflies. Photo by Blake Goll

While the grant focuses on a few target species, the value of the expanded receiver network has much broader implications. Any nanotagged animal that flies within nine or 10 miles of any of the receivers will be automatically tracked.

“Conservationists are rightly concerned about kestrels and monarch butterflies, and the work funded by this grant that may give us answers that allow us to reverse their declines,” said Lisa Kiziuk, director of bird conservation for the Willistown Conservation Trust. “But by greatly expanding the overall Motus network, the grant will also provide scientists and resource agencies with a treasure-trove of information on dozens of other migratory species, from at-risk songbirds like Bicknell’s thrush and rusty blackbirds to rare bats that travel through the Northeast, and about whose movements we know little or nothing.”

Lisa Kiziuk, Dave Brinker, and Scott Weidensaul of the Northeast Motus Collaboration standing next to a Motus receiver station at Rushton Farm.

“For me, this project is important because never before have we had the technology to see intimate details of an individual species’ migratory pathway in this way,” said Doug Bechtel, president of New Hampshire Audubon. “Motus technology and this particularly dense array that will be constructed in New England, especially in conjunction with the expansion in the mid-Atlantic states, will enable conservation organizations, industry leaders and legislative decision-makers to see how habitats are being used on a landscape level and make associated conservation decisions based on near real-time data.”

CONTACT INFORMATION

Lisa Kiziuk, Director of Bird Conservation, Willistown Conservation Trust. 610-331-5072, lkr@wctrust.org.

Scott Weidensaul, Northeast Motus Collaboration. 570-294-2335 (cell), scottweidensaul@verizon.net.

Monarch with nanotag. Photo by Grace Pitman

Willistown Conservation Trust, located in Chester County PA, is a land trust focused on preserving open space and habitat protection in the Willistown area. The Trust’s Bird Conservation team has operated the Rushton Woods Bird Banding Station since 2007, and has been a lead partner in the Northeast Motus Collaboration to save migrating bird species since its inception in 2016.

Our 1000th Bird – A Look at the Numbers

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At Rushton we do as the birds do and follow their seasons. Each season is unique in its own way, so when we look at the data, we look at each season independently. 

This fall we seem to be catching more birds than we have in the past. This does not contradict the recent reports of bird declines, it simply shows that during this small window of bird migration, over the short time span of 10 years, this is the most we have captured. It’s too soon to know why there are more birds this year; maybe the habitat is just right this year.  We changed the habitat slightly by increasing the shrub scrub due to a slightly altered mowing regime. We have also been able to band a little more this fall than in previous years, due to favorable weather. It could also be that we happen to be catching good migration weather, the best winds and on the right days. We have a set schedule of banding the same three days each week, but the birds travel when the weather is right, no matter what day!

A summary of 9 years of fall migration banding at Rushton:

We typically band from the last week in August until the first week in November, three days a week when conditions allow.

This year on October 10th we caught and banded our 1000th bird (a Black-throated Blue Warbler), at about halfway through the season, already surpassing our average total over the last nine years. Noting this great year, we hope this can become a tradition!

Our lowest year is likely due to fewer hours spent catching birds, more fairly, our lowest catch has been 893 birds and our highest in the last nine years was 1082 birds in 2013.

Looking forward, our winter residents and second most common bird of the fall season, the White-throated Sparrow, has yet to arrive, along with our tiniest fall migrant, the Ruby-crowned Kinglet, which combined, average another 200-300 birds, we can only begin to speculate how many birds we will total by November!

Table 1. Number of birds captured per year during fall migration.

First Birds Nanotagged at Rushton Woods Detected by Chesapeake Bay Motus Tower

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Exciting news! The first birds ever to be fitted with Motus nanotags at Rushton Woods Preserve have been detected by a Motus receiving station in the Chesapeake Bay. The birds are adult female wood thrush migrating south for the winter, after having spent the breeding season at Rushton. Who knows where they are headed next? Hopefully the Motus network will tell us. Stay tuned!

Using Motus and Rushton to Study the Wood Thrush

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The flutelike song of the wood thrush is emblematic of summer mornings at Rushton Woods Preserve. Unfortunately, both the wood thrush population and places like Rushton, with over 50 acres of deciduous forest, are rapidly disappearing. The loss is so dramatic that wood thrush are one of eight species of conservation concern identified for study by a recent Competitive State Wildlife Grant awarded to the Willistown Conservation Trust. 

One of our nanotagged Wood Thrush caught on September 17th. Photo by Blake Goll

Under the direction of Lisa Kiziuk, the Trust’s Director of Bird Conservation, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Amanda Bebel is conducting research on wood thrush as her capstone project. Amanda’s work is contributing additional scientific information about the wood thrush’s complete life cycle. The focus of her research is to learn precisely where they go during the breeding season. Since they nest in Rushton Woods Preserve, it is an ideal place to conduct the study. And the newly expanding Motus network, which electronically tracks birds’ movement, is an ideal research tool.

By attaching tiny nanotags (small radio transmitters) to six adults and three juveniles at Rushton Woods Preserve in Willistown and several more at Bucktoe Creek Preserve in Kennett Square, Amanda followed these birds during their breeding cycle with incredible geospatial precision. Throughout the summer, she used a hand-held tracking device to zero in on the birds to their physical location while general detections were consistently picked up by the local Motus automated receiver stations at both Rushton and Bucktoe. As the birds migrate south this fall, the broader Motus network that extends to South America will pick them up.

This work contributes more information to conservationists about how to better protect and manage wood thrush habitat. Pennsylvania plays a critical role in the conservation of the wood thrush as it supports a significant portion (approximately 8.5%) of the entire nesting population of the species.

What type of plants do they need for survival? How far do they go after they fledge? How much contiguous forest do they need? Where do they stop to rest and refuel on their migration path? We hope to learn more about these questions when Amanda completes her research in spring 2020. Stay tuned!

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

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Ruby-throated Hummingbird at Rushton Farm. Photo by Celeste Sheehan

After peeling yourself out of bed in the pitch black of pre-dawn in deliberate disobedience of your circadian rhythm, you wander through the dark to the bathroom where you reluctantly flip on the light and stand blinking into the mirror with owl sized pupils. You go through the motions of getting yourself dressed, quiet as a mouse so as not to wake your sleeping significant other. Finally you creep to the kitchen to adeptly pour coffee into your thermos without spilling a single precious drop even though the light from the east is still woefully dim.

When you get to the preserve, it is near dawn. The air is fresh, and the trees are alive with tinkling chip notes of migrant birds. As you get to work setting the nets in the hedgerows, you take comfort in the sound of an Eastern Screech Owl singing its haunting song down in the lower woods. You smile as the familiar catbird belts out its harsh petition for the sun to rise now. Above you, a rainbow stretches from one lavender cloud to the next and now you remember what it means to be a part of nature.

Billions of birds now have their sights set somewhere over that rainbow as they travel south by starlight. Our bird banding operation at Rushton Woods helps us monitor which migrants are using our specially managed preserve, understand how long they spend here preparing and fueling up for the journey, learn about populations and lifespans, and study their movements.

  • Yellow-breasted Chat captured this week. Photo by Blake Goll/Staff
  • Director of Bird Conservation, Lisa Kiziuk, educates visitor about a Gray Catbird before releasing it. Photo by Blake Goll/Staff

This fall has been excellent so far with a catch most days of 90-100 birds despite the warm weather we’ve been experiencing. Some highlights have included Connecticut Warbler, Yellow-breasted Chat, Nashville Warbler, and Worm-eating Warbler. Some of the most abundant species include Gray Catbird and American Goldfinch.

  • Chestnut-sided Warbler being banded. Photo by Celeste Sheehan
  • Connecticut Warbler banded 9/5. Photo by Blake Goll/Staff
  • Red-eyed Vireo banded this week. Photo by Blake Goll/Staff
  • American Redstart. Photo by Blake Goll/Staff
  • Black-throated Blue Warbler banded this week. Photo by Celeste Sheehan
  • Young Ruby-throated Hummingbird caught at Rushton this fall. We simply release these at the net since we do not have a special hummingbird banding license. Photo by Blake Goll/Staff

Songbird Banding Open House is Tomorrow Morning (9/14) from 7-10:30 am at Rushton Woods Preserve

Come on out to observe our bird banding, see incredible migratory birds up close, and chat with field scientists.

There’s a lot going on in the woods,

Blake

Monarch butterfly. Photo by Blake Goll/Staff