A Breeding Bird Atlas for Yolo County – and for California
Northern Yellow Warbler ©Erna Tarara
At a recent meeting, the Yolo Bird Alliance Board of Directors voted to join an ongoing statewide effort to produce a breeding bird atlas for each county. The atlas will document the population status, geographic distribution and breeding activity of every species in the county, ideally in every corner of the county. Such information is a huge help for deciding where to put local conservation projects and for evaluating the success of earlier ones, and it can show trends in abundance of the bird life of the county.
The project aims to run for five consecutive years, starting next year – which is only about two months from now for early breeders like great horned owl and collared dove. The atlas will be organized along the same lines as in the forty-four other states that have them, with the county divided into roughly three-mile square blocks aligned on the grids of US Geological Survey topographic maps, about one hundred blocks in all. Those with long memories will recall an earlier and very similar effort, led by the late Ed Whisler, which never got traction.
The difference that makes the project feasible today is that surveys will be done as eBird checklists, using the eBird breeding categories. Even better is that eBird will be the repository for all the checklists statewide, and the atlas will have its own portal in eBird. Criteria for determining that a survey block has been covered adequately are in preparation. The intent is to keep both the rules and the survey effort simple, so that volunteer birders can do the bulk of the field work.
YBA members will have two crucial roles in developing the atlas. The first was just hinted at – running the surveys. For such a big job, we will ask birders from nearby counties to help, since many of them already bird here regularly, and Napa, Solano and Sacramento counties already have atlases. The other task is to gain access to the many atlas blocks on private property, which include most of the land with greatest potential for interesting breeding birds – along the Sacramento River and Cache Creek, the valley part of Putah Creek, and on the Blue Ridge. YBA members will need to rely on our personal connections to allow surveyors onto those properties.
YBA has agreed to donate ten thousand dollars to the atlas effort, half of the amount now and half next year. Several other Audubon groups in the state have already donated, and both Audubon California and The Nature Conservancy have endorsed the project. Some of the budget pays Cornell University for the eBird portal. Some will pay field surveyors to cover census blocks that otherwise would be left undone. There is also money to summarize and make sense of the mountain of data.
Learn more about the project at www.californiabirdatlas.org.
–Michael Perrone, Conservation Chair