Wildlife Diversity Program Quarterly Report for January–March 2025
Preparing for Bird Nesting Season 2025, the First Season Post-Helene by Chris Kelly, Western Region Bird and Northern Carolina Flying Squirrel Biologist
A s more and more roads reopen, the western region bird crew has made more progress assessing impacts of Hurri- cane Helene to bird habitat. Of primary concern are areas that are home to Species of Greatest Conservation Need, such as a cerulean warbler hot spot just north of Asheville and northern saw-whet owl habitat around Mt. Mitchell and Roan Mountain.
of forest impacted), biologists had to pare it down to a selection of monitoring sites. Existing bird datasets that spatially overlap with hurricane impacts will be valuable for long-term monitor- ing and research. Examples include cerulean warbler monitor- ing point counts, bioacoustics surveys, game land point counts, NC Bird Atlas priority block datasets, and more. One of these, a bioacoustics survey and point count survey spearheaded by Steve Goodman of the National Parks Conservation Associa- tion (NPCA), was fortuitously completed in May 2024, giving us a snapshot of the bird community in northern Buncombe County in the last nesting season before Helene changed the face of this area. NCWRC continues the collaboration with NPCA and the U.S. Forest Service, and Steve has already begun deploying bioacoustic equipment for the 2025 nesting season. Our focus has shifted to long-term monitoring of the bird com- munity in this new, sometimes unrecognizable landscape with opportunities to study effects of land management activities aimed at forest recovery. Then, should our peers experience a natural disaster of this caliber, they can turn to lessons we’ve learned from Hurricane Helene.
Hurricane Helene was a source of forest disturbance, deliv- ering extensive blowdowns, landslides, and flooding, that exceeded the impact of The Great Flood of 1916. We looked for guidance from colleagues and the peer-reviewed litera- ture, finding little. Although there are numerous accounts of how wildlife responds to hurricanes in coastal areas and low- lands, there are fewer such accounts for hurricane impacts in uplands. With the frequency of severe storms projected to increase, Helene may not be the last such catastrophic storm in western NC. We need to learn as much as we can about how birds respond, how the forest regenerates, and what management is needed (such as control of invasive plant spe- cies) to ensure these forests flourish. Although it sometimes still feels like guesswork, we can look at bird species’ individual preferences for particular struc- ture of vegetation layers to predict how the bird community assemblage might shift. In large blowdowns, we anticipate a reduction in forest obligate species (wood thrush, veery, scarlet tanager), particularly those nesting in tree canopies (blackbur- nian warbler), and an increase in species associated with young forest (indigo bunting, chestnut-sided warbler) and forest with scattered trees and snags (flycatchers, woodpeckers). This quarter we considered approaches to monitoring this avian response. Given the scale of Helene’s impacts (>100,000 acres Wildlife Diversity Technician Clifton Avery walks by an area of im- portant bird habitat that suffered extensive tree blowdown from Hurricane Helene’s sustained winds of 40-90 mph.
Recording equip- ment deployed at one of the National Parks Conservation Association’s bio- acoustics survey sites in northern Buncombe Coun- ty in spring 2024, before Hurricane Helene. The same survey site photo- graphed from a slightly different angle in March 2025, post-Hurri- cane Helene.
STEVE GOODMAN
STEVE GOODMAN
7
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator