- Good morning, everyone.
It's my pleasure to welcome you here
to out next talk: Songbirds of Your Woodlands.
I'm Steve Swenson with the Aldo Leopold Foundation
in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
And it's my pleasure to introduce our next two speakers,
Yoyi Steele and Mike Mossman.
Yoyi is a wildlife biologist and a natural resources planner
with the Wisconsin DNR
and serves as the Important Bird Areas
and Southern Forest Coordinator
for the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative.
The Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative
is a statewide partnership
of over 180 groups working to advance
bird conservation across Wisconsin.
She has worked on bird conservation
and forest management issues in the driftless
for the past 10 years.
Mike Mossman is a newly retired
DNR ecologist who has studied the effects
of forest management and land use on birds,
amphibians, and small mammals.
He often works with landowners and land managers
and has a special interest in the relationship
between human history, landscapes, and wildlife populations.
Mike lives on a retired farm near
where he grew up in the Baraboo hills.
And on a more personal note,
I know both of them very well
through our own important bird area around Leopold's Shack
called the Leopold-Pine Island Important Bird Area.
And Mike and Yoyi have been extremely influential
in helping us make the most of that land.
So, with that, I welcome Mike.
- Thanks, Steve.
Let me get right onto the slides here.
A lot of things we're going to talk about today
will be things you've heard already today.
Our goal here is basically to familiarize you with
birds, their habitats, and how you can
help understand your woods more by looking at the birds
and using the birds to engage you
and draw you into that forest more and your management.
Birds depend on habitat entirely.
Anything that happens with the habitat,
whether it's succession or things that we do to it
purposefully or not, affects what the bird community will be.
And we're going to talk about some of the processes
and the sort of principles that govern that,
and not so much about what to do on your own land.
As you'll see, there's many factors that can be involved in
how you want to manage your own land
and how it would affect the birds
or what birds you might choose to manage for or not.
We do have a couple handouts.
We have one on principles of land management for birds
over there, and another one that's one
some resources that might be useful to you
for managing land.
And a third one that's a little bit more technical on
birds of different sorts of habitats in the driftless area.
So, there's a great richness of birds in the driftless area,
and a lot of them really need help, conservation help.
Their populations are declining.
And for many of those species,
the driftless area is one of the best places
in the world to manage for them.
So, we're going to focus a little bit more on those.
But when we talk about birds we're also
really talking about whole plant/animal communities.
The birds kind of represent those.
We know a lot about bird biology,
about the effects of management on birds,
but we also know that,
what's good for a particular bird
is good for a whole suite of other species
where they're talking about plants, small mammals,
or insects.
In our selection of birds to talk about
and to emphasize, those are birds that generally
represent entire communities.
So just keep that in mind.
Here's the principles I mentioned,
and I'm not going to go through those now,
but our slide show will follow those.
And, again, they're in that handout,
and there is a kind of a little explanation
for each of these.
The primary
kind of most important point is birds respond to habitat,
and birds within a forest,
birds sort of assume different niches in the forest.
And this is an example of this.
If you just look within a
particular stream gorge in the Baraboo hills, for example,
where I did studies
for my master's long ago,
looking at flycatchers.
So, this is one group of birds, one family of birds.
They look a lot alike.
They feed a lot alike.
They perch on a limb, fly out, grab an insect, come back,
or fly up to a leaf, fly next to the leaf, grab and insect,
and come back to perch.
So, they're very similar ecology in a lot of ways,
but certain woods have different species
than other woods would have.
And here's this sort of a schematic representation.
First of all, there's a difference in the heights
that they feed at.
You can see the crested flycatcher,
is the largest of the flycatchers,
tends to feed up above the canopy
or in big openings in the canopy.
They're sort of adapted to--
Because they're the biggest, they fly the farthest,
get the biggest insects.
They're more adapted to openings
and I guess, because of that, they nest in cavities.
They're likely to occur in places where there's dead trees.
Eastern pewee is the next largest,
and it's a species that
tends to feed in this layer, lower layer of the canopy.
Then you have least flycatcher and Acadian flycatchers
feeding and nesting and successively lower levels,
and the Phoebe, which is more generalized,
but is always limited by nest site,
so it's always near a cliff or a building.
If you look at the kind of structures
that favor each species,
you can see here, let's assume these are oak trees here,
it's fairly open canopy,
some space between the canopies, some light coming down.
The pewee loves these
oak, lower oak canopies
where there's space between the branches
where they can forage
and build their nest on sort of a horizontal oak limb.
It's a typical place for them.
And, actually, their nest looks like a--
They decorate it with lichens.
It looks like a knob on a white oak limb.
In this case,
the understory that's responding to this gap here is low.
It creates a lot of feeding space for the pewee.
If you get to a situation where it's a little more
farther along in succession
from the disturbance or whatever
or the fire that has allowed this canopy opening to be there
and some of these trees grow up higher,
you get these saplings
invading that space, pewees tend to
either disappear or just get
lower density.
Least flycatchers love those
spaces in the sapling layer.
So, that's where we get the Least flycatchers.
Acadian flycatchers occur
more on the right there where you see the Hemlock maple
type canopy, full canopy,
almost no vegetation on the ground,
and some scattered Witch Hazel shrubs
or Sugar Maple saplings that they nest in.
You can find a woods that has all these birds,
if it has all those kind of variety of structures.
And the Phoebe has very--
because it's so limited to its nesting site,
it really doesn't have very many
requirements for what sort of a canopy there is.
They'll be where there's full canopy,
they'll be where there's open canopy,
but they pretty much need that nest site.
So, that's what limits them.
Some of these habitat niches
that the birds take,
they can be broad or they can be very narrow
according to the species.
In Wisconsin, the Black-capped chickadee would be an example
of a bird that has a very broad niche.
Just about any wooded
or semi-wooded habitat would have chickadees.
Whereas something on the other end of the spectrum,
the Yellow-throated warbler on the left,
which occurs in Wisconsin only in a few sites,
like the Baraboo hills and Wyalusing area,
where there's mature oaks with super canopy white pines.
Some species respond to specific
characteristics of the habitat.
Woodpeckers, or cavity nesters, are one.
We're talking about a
pileated woodpecker that needs these large trees to nest
and feed in,
where the Prothonotary warbler, down on the lower right,
that lives only in flood plain forests and nests only in
broken off snags that are
either in the water or right next to the water.
Or, on the left, the Winter wren,
which occurs
especially in old growth forests where the
large trees have fallen over,
and it needs those large trees to nest in,
and that's where they feed in those
kind of complicated understory of stilt roots
and fallen large trees.
Some species
will respond to kind of general habitat structure.
Two examples here, this is in northern Wisconsin,
but we have the same sorts of structures here.
In the upper left,
an old pine stump with a
Sugar maple forest that's
grown up in an even-aged structure
all at the same time, very simple forest.
You have kind of a small
set of species living in there because the structure is
so simple, but the Red-eyed vireo does fine.
Down in the lower right, you have the wood thrush,
which requires a lot more kind of a diverse
pattern of understory structure,
like this, which shows another tree that's fallen down.
It could be a site that
has been managed and the canopy opened
and some structure in the understory that's developed.
And usually the wood thrushes won't be in that opening until
the understory gets to be sapling age.
Canopy openings are really important part of our management.
They're created, of course, naturally.
They were created by lightning strikes, windthrows,
old age of old canopy trees, et cetera,
and now mostly by management,
but also by disease and windthrow.
These are very important for a number of birds that like
openings within woods.
A lot of times a species that are benefited by this
don't care that much what that understory is.
So, the grouse is probably more,
cares about aspen, perhaps, more.
But these other species would be,
like the Blue-winged warbler, Hooded warbler,
and Chestnut Sided on the top, Indigo Bunting and
Eastern Towhee on the bottom.
They're responding more to that structure.
So, whether you're creating an opening and it's coming back to oak
or whether it's coming back to sugar maple might not make a
lot of difference, but, of course, it makes a huge difference in the future
with where that forest is going.
Let's not forget oak savannas.
Armund talked a lot about this this morning.
And there's a whole suite of birds
that are adapted to the pre-settlement oak savanna
that now oftentimes will do fine
in grasslands with scattered trees,
such as the Bluebird Red-headed woodpecker,
Orchard oriole, Field sparrow, and Brown thrasher.
Let's not forget that some places
that we might be able to convert into forest
also have a special place for
a lot of these birds and other wildlife.
A rare community worldwide.
But oaks, in general,
are really important component of the forest,
whether we're talking savanna or woodland or oak forest.
Here we have an example of
a site in the upper left that is
succeeding to maple woods,
a site on the lower right which is
oak woodland managed by cutting and burning.
All these species illustrated here are some that
either require or do much better in oak
forest rather than central hardwoods or maple forests,
like the Blue-gray gnatcatcher down the left,
feeding during the pulse of,
during migration, during that pulse of catkins emerging.
They love, like a lot of warblers,
a lot of migrant songbirds,
their migrations are pretty much timed to that
emergence of catkins and all the caterpillar
larvae and eggs and so on that are associated with those.
Oaks are especially diverse with
prey items like that,
moreso than the other hardwoods that we have.
There's the Eastern pewee then to the right of that
in that nest that I said looks like an oak knob.
Worm-eating warbler
that basically is a very rare bird.
It occurs only in the driftless area in Wisconsin,
and is specific to stream
slopes and kind of stream gorges
in the upper stretches of them
where you have really mature oaks and a lot of oak litter.
Cerulean warbler in the center right
is a species we're very concerned with.
Yoyi will talk more about that.
A species that likes really mature trees,
but it also really like oaks.
So, there's a big of a dilemma there
in terms of it needs these mature,
big trees that like sort of a semi-open canopy,
but if we're going to keep the oak trees it really loves,
we have to think about where we're going to
destroy its habitat, temporarily perhaps,
to let it--
And hope there will be something for it somewhere else.
So, when we're talking about management like this,
a lot of these--
Our discussion is--
These systems are all dynamic.
We're talking about having space for these species
on the landscape one place or another,
and sometimes to manage them the habitat will become
unsuitable for some of the species
that we're actually managing for,
at least for a while.
Tanager is another example of a species that
just likes oak trees or maple woods as well,
but there's more of them in oak woods.
Down in the bottom, we have a blue jay with an acorn
because there are some of these species that really do,
you know, focus in on acorns.
Blue jay being one, at least during the fall and winter,
and Red-headed woodpecker being another one.
Another reminder that
what we do for one species to favor
will disfavor others, and it's nowhere more obvious than
what to do with that hay field on the ridge top.
Do we want to keep it as a hay field on the upper left,
or do we want to plant it to oaks or something else on the lower right?
It's a great opportunity to plant it to oaks.
That's one way we can maintain oaks on the landscape to some extent.
But, again, you're trading the
Bobolinks for other birds eventually.
Bobolink being another bird that needs help,
but a grassland specialist.
And we can just look at that,
the same concept, in a local spot in the woods
where we have something like this Acadian flycatcher nest
on the right, right above the lady's hand,
in a Witch Hazel in what you can see is kind of a typical
Sugar maple woods with very little understory.
And that's a threatened bird in Wisconsin,
and the driftless area is its home.
Another bird whose home is the driftless area in Wisconsin
is the Kentucky warbler on the left, which will never
live in the woods on the right, but if you were to open that up
and if it was a large enough woods, rich enough,
you might get a Kentucky warbler to come into that opening,
which is its preferred habitat.
One more example of the same thing.
Oak dominated woods or woodlands
that are invaded, like on the lower left,
by ashes and hickories,
Yellow-bud hickories, and exotic shrubs
are great for Rose-breasted Grosbeaks.
But whereas that woods had it
and Rose-breasted Grosbeaks don't need a lot of help,
they're doing fairly well,
whereas, on the right, you've got an oak
woodland that's been managed by fire and cutting,
which is open on the understory
and is the sort of habitat that we need
to maintain Whip-poor-wills,
which are really in need of help.
We also need to think about the context
and size of the habitats or of your land.
You may have two woods that are very similar in nature.
A 40-acre piece, for example,
whether it's situated in a large forest
makes a big difference for the birds and other wildlife
than if it's isolated among agriculture.
And, as an example for how birds respond to this,
the Great Horned owl
is pretty much an edge species and would
almost certainly be in that landscape in the upper left.
Pretty agricultural but there's some scattered wood lots.
It'll find a place to nest, and it
has plenty of edge to feed in, in open areas.
Whereas the Barred owl, in the lower left,
likes extensive forest, has a big territory,
like the Great Horned does,
but that territory has to be wooded.
So, in that sort of typical
driftless area scene in the middle,
you might get both Great Horned and Barred owls.
But if you go down to the Baraboo Hills, on the lower right,
with these massive extensive forests,
there's no place for Great Horned owl there,
although it may exist on the edges of some of these woods.
But it's basically Barred owl habitat.
So, that's an example of context and size,
but it also applies to birds
that may have a really small territory,
like an Indigo Bunting or a Hooded warbler
whose territory may only be an acre or two
centered around an opening in the forest.
These are both species that like that shrubby
response to canopy opening.
You may have that same structure of,
say, a half-acre opening
in each of these three woods that looks very similar.
The Bunting would be in all of them.
The Bunting is generalized.
It's in all openings, edges in the driftless area.
It's a bird that doesn't need help
because it does have such a general habitat.
Whereas the Hooded warbler is one
that likes these shrubby openings
but only in extensive forests.
Even though, again,
its territory doesn't go much beyond that opening.
So, up in the upper left, you'd never have a Hooded warbler,
that center landscape maybe, and that lower right-hand
almost every opening of a quarter acre of more
with scattered with semi-thick shrubs
in the Baraboo Hills will have a Hooded warbler in it.
So, I'm going to leave it up to Yoyi next.
- So, I'm actually going to
go back a minute,
start my talk, my part of the talk here.
This concept of
sort of the site and the neighborhood
is one that may seem unusual,
especially for little birds like this
that they actually are affected by
what may be outside the specific site that they're occurring.
And so, the best analogy,
I think, that I can make for this
is the example of real estate.
I mean, if you think
of the little site where a bird might nest
as the house
and what exists outside of that is the neighborhood,
anybody here that's going to buy a house
would never just look at the house.
You'd always look at the neighborhood, right?
Because you want specific characteristics in your house,
but it also has to be in the right neighborhood, right?
It's got to be next to schools or close to your job
or close to family or whatever your needs are, your desires.
You would never...
You'd probably never
be interested in a gorgeous house
that was in a crappy neighborhood.
Probably.
So the same goes for birds.
If you're a Wood thrush, say,
and you're looking for some property
and when bird conservationists
think about habitat,
what we're interested in is maximizing production.
Is really making sure that the species not just occurs there
and not just nests there but nests there successfully,
is able to raise young successfully,
and that those young can survive to the next generation.
So, it isn't just enough that the bird is there
or that the bird is nesting there but
that it's productive and that it's reproducing successfully.
In order to provide habitat for a bird like this,
you really need to look at all these different scales.
You need to look at the landscape.
And what this shows, the map with the weird colors on it,
is a habitat suitability model showing where
are the best places in the Upper Midwest
where you might want to manage for Wood thrushes.
Basically, where's the forest?
And then this
photo up here showing sort of a local forested landscape
where Wood thrushes might occur.
And then the
little forest patch in the middle is,
similar to what Mike said, the kind of habitat
at the site scale that they're attracted to where they need
little patches of saplings in a larger forested context.
It's really important to have all three of these together
in order to successfully produce populations of birds.
Especially birds that we're concerned with,
like the Wood thrush.
So this is why we--
The only rule of real estate
is location, location, location.
The same is true for bird habitat.
So we always want to
think global and act local
or set our priorities from the top down.
It's really useful to do this,
super informative
for you as a landowner
to situate yourself in a larger context and figure out,
where am I on the landscape?
What are my opportunities here?
What are the unique opportunities that exist here
that maybe do not exist elsewhere?
And so that's kind of what this slide is about.
I think Rick said something very similar in his talk,
and Armund Bartz did in his talk as well.
This concept of
figuring out where you are on the landscape
and what that might tell you about
what's likely to be successful for your management,
what you might want to do with your property.
So when we think about birds, there are,
like Mike said, a great diversity of birds
in the driftless area.
The species that you see here are special
because they're of high conservation concern.
Many of these species are in trouble.
Actually, they're all in trouble.
All of these here are in trouble.
The key thing about this particular grouping of birds
is that they only occur in our southern forests
in Wisconsin.
We have a lot of northern forests.
These birds really do not have any opportunity up there
for the most part.
There are a couple of exceptions here on the slide.
But if we're going to keep these species in Wisconsin,
we're going to have to keep them here.
We're going to manage for them here.
And when you think about forests in southern Wisconsin,
there's a little forest in the southeast.
We still have the kettles out there,
but the driftless has the most, the greatest, and the best.
So if we're going to keep these species,
we got to manage for them here.
As I said, these species are not doing well.
This is a bulleted list
of some of the species you saw on the previous slide.
And this is population change
over a 44-year period, 1970-2014.
This just came out in the latest revision
to the Partners in Flight Landbird Conservation Plan
for North America.
This is the proportion of the global population
of each of these species that's been lost in that time.
Some pretty shocking numbers
ranging from 25% for Kentucky warbler,
67% for Whip-poor-will,
73% for Cerulean warbler.
So that's a tremendous amount of the population
that's been lost.
So this is why we're concerned with these species.
Getting back to
understanding where we are on the landscape,
we've got this map of the driftless area.
It is a four-state area,
but Wisconsin has the most of the driftless area.
We also have the biggest,
best, and most connected chunks of forest
that are remaining in the driftless area.
And so we have the best opportunity.
We also have the highest responsibility.
I also want to make the point,
just getting back to Mike's ridge top field example
with the Bobolink versus the Oven bird,
the driftless also has a lot of great grassland opportunity.
Most of that is down here
in this part
where there really some very extensive
wide open landscapes, working landscapes primarily,
that are great for grassland birds.
There's where you see the differences is in terms of
situating yourself on a landscape and thinking,
gosh, what are the opportunities?
If I'm down here in the southwest grasslands,
I mean, that's really,
should be pointing you in the direction of,
gosh, you know, savanna prairie,
maybe a nice little woodland in a draw.
Whereas, if you're up here,
maybe primarily sort of north of the Wisconsin River,
that's really a great forested landscape.
That's how you can use
sort of landscape context to help you make decisions
and figure out, what you might want to do
on your property for birds.
Another thing to realize is that
birds' needs change throughout their life cycle.
Up here, in the north,
we get them during the breeding season,
but if you notice, in the red, that's just a very, very short
period of time in the yearly life cycle of a bird.
It is a very important time in their life, of course.
They're breeding. They're producing young.
This is the next generation.
Of course, most of these birds do not stay here.
They come, they breed,
they raise their young, and they leave.
It's very important to understand that
a lot of the birds that we're concerned with
have to make these very long journeys.
They spend the winter in other places
where they can run into many different
conservation problems.
That passage back is very important,
not just for birds that may breed,
that stay to breed in the driftless area, but
think of all of those, neotropical warblers
that pass through the driftless area
and they don't nest here.
They nest in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota and Canada.
But as they're passing through, and Mike mentioned this,
the food resource that oaks represent in the spring
for these birds is extremely important.
It's important for the birds that stay to breed here;
it's also important for the birds that are passing through
that are making, in many cases, just fantastic journeys.
One-night migrations across the Gulf of Mexico.
Then they get to the coast,
and they got to cross the corn and soybean desert to get up here.
Or they're coming across the Great Lakes.
These birds are wanting to reach their breeding grounds
in as best condition as they possibly can.
As soon as they get there, they got to defend a territory,
attract a mate, and raise young.
And so that food resource that they encounter here,
as they're moving through,
is very, very critically important.
And so the prospect of losing oaks on the landscape
is frightening.
It really has conservation implications,
again not just for the birds that breed here
but for all of our birds that pass through here
and require that food resource in the spring.
- So you've seen this
basic instruction, I guess, many times today, probably,
about having goals for your property.
What we hope is that wildlife in a broad sense
and plant/animal communities are part of that
as represented by birds.
But it's very important when we're
asking people to think about birds in managing
their property
that partnerships are really essential and multiple goals.
I mean, to have clear goals
but to have management is going to fulfill as many of your
goals that you might have as possible.
For us to ask someone or even on our own property
to manage it specifically for birds is not going to happen.
I mean, that has to fit in with the finances.
It's got to fit in with
other things that you want for your property.
And so this is where it's really important to sit down with
someone that can help you and figure out--
Do some reading, get to know the birds,
get out there, see what's out there,
get together with people that can help you plan,
and try to make goals that are going to work.
If you're managing with goals,
no matter what your goals are, this is sort of what
makes sense to follow this sort of cycle of planning,
implementing your management,
going out there and monitoring it,
using whatever you want, whatever is important to you
and useful as a gauge
for the success of your management, and then adapting.
And if you're monitoring birds or other plants and animals,
it really helps draw you into the land.
It helps you understand more of the complexities,
not just what you're monitoring,
but the other things that you learn along the way.
And there's help for this,
if you're interested
in learning how to do it and interpreting it.
Also, remember that in our goals,
our goals aren't necessarily for an end result.
All these woodlands and
landscapes in the driftless area are dynamic,
so your goal should be for a process as much as for
an end result.
And I just use this as an example of savanna restoration.
Of all the phases that a piece of land might go through,
from an oak woods there on the upper left
and you want to get to that center place where it's
a savanna or a woodland,
it has to go through all these
what may look like horrible
expressions of land change.
You may be cutting down
entire pine plantations, like in the lower left.
Burning, cutting.
And, actually, all these phases have
benefits for birds.
I mean, there's a lot of cool birds
that'll exist in just about every phase of this.
And if your end goal is a savanna
and know that's going to be there for a while,
who knows how long it's going to last,
what storm is going to come knock it down.
Always be ready for change
and embrace that change as best you can.
There's also things that happen
that are just basically beyond your control
around your landscape.
You may be in a site where you're fairly isolated.
Your wood lot may be fairly isolated.
Well, maybe over the next 20 or 30 years
we start getting more abandoned fields
growing up to woods around you.
It changes your options.
It makes it more-- Maybe you can bring in more
woodland-loving wildlife as a result of that on your piece.
Or opposite, if the woods start disappearing around you
or changing in some way with time,
you may want to adjust your goals to fit into that.
Finances, you know, the economy of the region.
They all make an influence,
and so our goals need to be adaptable.
But, still, goal is something that you want to adhere to
as best you can.
On the lower right is an example of
Baraboo Hills openings up on top of the bluffs,
which would have been formerly forested and savanna
but had been turned to agriculture in the 1800s.
Well, this field in the lower left, that guy died.
I don't know if you can see the shrub encroachment
that's happening there, a woody encroachment.
That's going to be a woods eventually,
which is going to change the value for grassland birds for the neighbors.
And it also will improve the
forest capacity of the woods
right around where that field is now.
Last thing to leave you with, I guess, is just that
appreciating birds,
using them as a way to draw yourself into the land
and see the effects of your management.
Birds are a really good way
to watch the effects of management or of non-management.
Whatever happens on the landscape or doesn't happen.
So we encourage you to give that a shot.
And, as an example right at the end,
we want to give you two woods that were managed
sort of using these principles in part
but in different landscapes with different goals
and how they both had desired effects
but quite different ones.
We're going to compare the John Nielsen tract.
Some of you know him, a former DNR forester.
His 200 acres is in a really
heavily forested area of Richland County.
The Mossman-Hartman tract that I own with my wife
is at the edge of the Baraboo Hills
but in an area that was naturally prairie and savanna.
A much more open landscape.
We developed different goals.
We have slightly different histories on these tracts,
but kind of different potential that we're trying to meet.
On our tract, it was,
as I mentioned, savanna, marsh and prairie.
A history of
pasturing everywhere, of course, and some cropland.
And our goal was savanna,
ecosystem restoration, and some forest products.
We're limited to what we can get in forest products.
It's not very conducive to it.
Steep slopes,
not real fertile soils,
and some of it's wet and a lot of it's rocky.
The Nielsen tract,
that 240 acres was pre-settlement maple/oak forest,
and the history was high grading.
So a lot of forestry that John wanted to sort of
recover the woods from, as well as pasture and cropland.
His goal was more forest oriented.
He wants sustainable forestry, wood products and wildlife.
So, we've worked with John on his plans
and monitoring his property.
His goal, basically, is,
he's not really concerned with grassland birds.
He wants some deer, turkey.
He wants good forest, good productive forest.
That's, I think, kind of his main thing.
And so his fields are being planted to oaks.
That's a big oak plantation where he just overplanted,
you know, seeded acorn
and got way above the deer browse right away.
And that field will be an oak forest before too long.
Lower left, he's letting some of his,
representing sort of central hardwoods.
He's letting some of his oak woods go,
or what would have been oak woods, to central hardwoods
just in places where it's going to be too hard
to maintain oak on these north slopes, et cetera.
In the center is an area
where he is trying to regenerate oaks
with more open,
more extreme logging and opening it up.
Lower right, this shows sort of these
young forests recovering from the forest,
from the high grading in the past.
And so, also, he has to, like on any piece of land,
cut and treat invasives is also an important part.
You can see the other forestry practices
he's done on the list there.
Our tract is much more
geared towards open habitats.
But again, oak is one of the main goals.
And so, we're burning.
We're cutting off cedars.
We're cutting out basswoods and mesophytic species.
We're leaving almost all the oaks.
We have some oak woodland,
white oak woodland, down in the lower left.
We have savanna on some of the more extreme sites.
Some goat prairies here on the lower right.
This woods, when we bought the property in '95,
was covered with red cedars and buckthorn,
and you didn't even know there were hardwoods in there hardly
until we got going.
For example, these are all hardwoods,
almost all oaks that were hidden by the cedars.
Different goals.
We both used birds to help us gauge the success.
You see in the Nielsen tract on the left,
he has Acadian flycatcher, Hooded warbler,
Acadian flycatcher, Hooded warbler,
Cerulean warbler,
Red start, Wood thrush,
Forest interior, a large block forest species.
Whereas, for us,
instead of increasing the forest species,
when we bought the property we thought about
can we ever get these species that Nielsen got?
It's like, no,
not unless we really, really spent a lot of work
and we still wouldn't be guaranteed to get it
because the landscape isn't right around them.
So we went to the savanna
because there was still lots of opportunities
for that savanna restoration there, lots of oaks.
And we've been getting what we want as a result.
Red-headed woodpeckers, Field sparrows,
Orchard oriole, Whip-poor-will.
We've been able to at least keep them, keep them there,
keep one there.
And Willow flycatchers down in the shrubs
along the stream, and Eastern King bird, for example.
And we both have a lot of the generalized forest species
on both of our properties,
like the Red-eyed Vireo, Scarlet tanager,
Eastern pewee, and Blue-gray gnatcatcher.
Two landscapes, two sets of goals.
Trying to match your goals
to the capability of the landscape
and trying to match your bird goals to the other--
What you're into, what's important to you.
And use the birds sort of as a
method of gauging your success and also to
get you more involved in the property.
There's a whole lot of other birds out there
that aren't on this slide as well.
Any questions?
[audience applauds]