State of Ontario's Forest Birds

Debbie Badzinski
Ontario Program Manager
Bird Studies Canada
PDF (72KB)

Background

Bird Studies Canada is a Canadian non-profit organization dedicated to the study, understanding, and conservation of wild birds and their habitats. Bird Studies Canada was founded in 1960 as Long Point Bird Observatory, located on the north shore of Lake Erie in Ontario, Canada. Beginning in the mid 1970s, the Observatory's programs grew into regional and then national and international projects. In recognition of its greatly enhanced geographical scope, the Observatory was renamed Bird Studies Canada in the mid 1990s. BSC is Canada's lead non-government, non-profit organization dedicated to the study and conservation of birds.

The State of Ontario's Forest Birds report is a multi-partner effort involving the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR), Bird Studies Canada (BSC), and the Canadian Wildlife Service. The report is being coordinated by Dean Phoenix, a member of the OMNR Terrestrial Assessment Program.

Peter Blancher, of Environment Canada, was the lead author on the paper "Population trend status of Ontario's forest birds", that was based on State of Ontario's Forest Birds report, and was published in the Forestry Chronicle (Blancher et al., 2009).

Objectives

The State of Ontario's Forest Birds is a comprehensive report on the status of Ontario's birds, which is aimed to: report on biodiversity and status reliability, integrate and assess monitoring results, and identify gaps in coverage (species and geographic).

Assessing the reliability of trend information from each survey provides a measure of confidence in current bird status, and can also be used as a tool for designing improvements to monitoring in Ontario.

Questions Addressed by the State of Ontario's Forest Birds Study

1. Which species in each region are declining, stable or increasing?

2. Which species within each guild are declining, stable or increasing?

3. How reliable are the status designations by region by species?

4. Which surveys provide primary and secondary evidence for species status by region?

5. Which species should we flag for further investigations?

6. What are the monitoring gaps by species and region?

Redundancy

The State of Ontario's Forest Birds is the first comprehensive report on Ontario's bird status that reports on all species at multiple spatial scales. It will draw heavily from the atlas but will have higher level messaging that can be used for the general public (overall trends - not species specific). The report will assess trends and reliability, with survey biases identified.

Why birds?

There is federal responsibility with the Migratory Birds Convention Act (MBCA) and provincial responsibility for wildlife monitoring (Environmental Assessment Act). As well, the Crown Forest Sustainability Act ensures that forests are managed in a way that sustains environmental values (fish, wildlife, water quality, etc.), economic values (timber, trapping, tourism, etc.) and social values (recreational, heritage, etc.).

Birds are also useful to study as they are relatively easy to monitor, may be used as indicators, and are abundant with approximately 300 species of birds in Ontario.

Results

The trend in status was evaluated for 136 species. Overall, 47% increased, 21% declined in recent decades, with both large increases (³ 100%, 18 species) and large declines (³ 50%, 10 species). Overall, there were more increases in the Far North, and no significant differences in trends for Ontario versus continent wide.

Conclusions

In general, the trends for forest birds in Ontario were stable or increasing, with no differences in percent increase/ decrease by forest type. There were more declines for neotropical migrants from the Boreal Softwood Shield, however, there was a lack of data for the Boreal Softwood Shield resulting in low reliability.

This assessment used a combination of objective measures of trend precision and range coverage, subjective assessments of bias and a team approach to result integration. Surveys with mid- and long-term trends were of greatest importance in this exercise. There was a heavy reliance on the Breeding Bird Atlases for status, especially in the North, highlighting the fact that we will need better monitoring coverage of the boreal (BCR12 North and BCR8) if we want to have any certainty regarding the status of birds in this area prior to the next Atlas.

Additionally, aerial insectivores as a group were found to be a major conservation concern, but this included birds from many different habitat types. Agricultural and grassland birds were found to be declining more than forest birds.

Next Steps

Next steps include identifying gaps in species and geographic coverage, and to work collectively to address these gaps (e.g., Breeding Bird Surveys in the boreal). This includes addressing the report's lack of data on waterbirds, marshbirds, shorebirds, raptors, and waterfowl.

All bird information will be tied together into a "State of Ontario's Birds" report by March 2010. This report, on top of other information, will be fed into the 2010 Ontario Biodiversity Report, and other "State of" reports. This information will be made readily available to inform policy, management and species recovery.

References

Blancher, P.J., Phoenix, R.D., Badzinski, D.S., Cadman, M.D., Crewe, T.L., Downes, C.M., Fillman, D., Francis, C.M., Hughes, J., Hussell, D.J.T., Lepage, D., McCracken, J.D., McNicol, D.K., Pond, B.A., Ross, R.K., and Russell, R. (2009). Population trend status of Ontario's forest birds. Forestry Chronicle. 85 (2): 184-201.

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