Monday January 20th, 7 pm
Nocturnal peeps: what night sounds can tell us about shorebird migration in Montana
Shorebirds cover huge distances during spring and fall migration, passing over entire states without touching land. Where they settle, wetlands provide critical resources for refueling. With widespread population declines, understanding all aspects of their life histories is important to conserving populations. Because most shorebirds migrate at night and daytime shorebird identification challenges many birders, we understand very little about their migration through Montana and the Intermountain West. However, shorebirds make unique flight calls while migrating, and we can often identify them to species based on these calls.
Some of you may recall the “Bitterroot Array”- an installation of up to 50 recording units deployed annually from 2013 to 2019 at sites in Montana to study nocturnal bird migration. Though we set most units in the Bitterroot Valley, we had a handful of sites east of the Continental Divide. We focused most effort on fall migration but also had some units recording in the spring. Several Bitterroot Bird Alliance members hosted recording units at their property, as did schools like Florence and Darby High Schools. We also had units at familiar locations in the high country- sites like St Mary’s Peak and Sula Peak.
This effort resulted in over 20 terabytes of acoustic data. Because of the massive amount of data and the difficulty in identifying some western bird species by flight calls, we decided to tackle shorebird calls during the year 2017 for an initial analysis. In this presentation, we’ll walk you through how our Bitterroot data helped train the machine-learning model “Nighthawk” (think “Merlin” for nocturnal flight calls) and how scientists everywhere can use this application to better understand bird migration happening at night. But more importantly, we’ll share some of our results about the shorebirds migrating over our valley- species you might never see or even expect. We’ll also compare the findings from our recordings to the on-the-ground surveys several BBA members performed at Lee Metcalf NWR the past two years as part of the Intermountain West Shorebird Survey.
Kate Stone is a long-time board member of Bitterroot Bird Alliance and an ecologist at the MPG Ranch. Like many people, she struggles with visual shorebird identification in the field because she sees relatively few of them. But as an “ear birder” at heart, she loves the use of acoustic tools to study bird populations.
Please join BBA for this glimpse into the scientific process of innovation and discovery during our January virtual program. You will need to register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/BOsWvJQTTlOzuJX7sDot5g
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
