Bird news

Tree swallows moved into the new bluebird nest boxes this year at the High Plains Arboretum. Photo by Mark Gorges.

Bird banter includes news from the backyard and back of beyond

Published Aug. 4, 2023, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.  

By Barb Gorges

            Last month I reported how quickly my robins moved into their favorite nest spot after the house sparrows’ unfortunate nest was removed nearby.

            Well, the robins abandoned their nest after too much activity under and over it when our lawn sprinkler system was being repaired. As soon as they left, the house sparrows took over their nest. They are constantly bringing in more grass to fix it and I think I heard young birds cheeping.

            On July 26, I saw our first broad-tailed hummingbird this year in our red beebalm. She didn’t like the way it was fenced in, so I think we’ll take the fence down temporarily and keep the puppy corralled elsewhere.

            Also July 26, but earlier, I heard a broad-tailed hummingbird at 10,000 feet in the Snowy Range, so not all the hummers up there were finished with nesting.

            In Riverton the week before, I stayed at the dorms at Central Wyoming College. Sleeping next to an open window, one morning I could hear the call of a goldfinch over and over – at 5 a.m. Was it a call of warning or distress?

            Mark and I also did a little birding with friends up there who live next to Ocean Lake. Marta introduced us to her kingbirds, phoebes, and tree swallows, but the owls were not at home.

            Many bird topics come up at Cheyenne Audubon board meetings. At our July meeting, our vice president was incredulous that the U.S. Forest Service has been doing prescribed burns in June and July to reduce underbrush in the Pole Mountain area west of Cheyenne. They’ve scorched hundreds of trees where birds may have been nesting at that time of year.

            The chapter has funded a transmitter for one of the birds in a white-faced ibis migration study. Among the birds captured in Wyoming was a glossy ibis – quite far from home.

            We’ve also been assisting Rustin Rawlings in collecting data for NestWatch on the eight bluebird boxes he put up at the High Plains Arboretum this spring. House wrens and tree swallows are enjoying them. Maybe the mountain bluebirds will show up next year when the boxes are more weathered.

            National Audubon is holding a conference in November for training and inspiring community environmental activists. It will be in Estes Park, Colorado. Getting there could be tricky that time of year but would be an incredible experience if you want to go.

            Three board members met Cidney Handy, the new Audubon Rockies staff member based in Cheyenne. She is a range ecologist for Audubon’s Conservation Ranching Initiative. She’s looking for Wyoming ranchers that would like to enroll for free who are interested in learning bird-friendly ranching practices that can bring them a premium price in the retail market.

            Cheyenne Audubon board members briefly discussed the Bureau of Land Management’s calls for public comments on conservation leasing and updating sage grouse policies.

            The Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, headquartered in nearby Brighton, Colorado, has a lot of activities for all ages coming up. Check their website at https://www.birdconservancy.org/.

            I subscribe to BirdLife International’s email newsletters, https://www.birdlife.org/. It is a partnership of 120 national organizations in more than 115 countries. Bad news about disappearing bird species is balanced by stories of victories. Recently, the European Union’s Parliament voted to pass the EU Nature Restoration Law. There were 140 amendments, but the final text was accepted by a margin of 36 votes out of a total of 648.

            I’m not on Twitter, but I always thought it was cute – the chubby bluebird logo and calling posts “tweets.” But the new owner is changing the platform’s name to “X.” It feels like he’s targeting sweet little birds. Instead of tweeting, will people be “X-ing” things? Sounds like crossing them out.

            On the other hand, ChangeX, Microsoft’s community grants program, has been providing Cheyenne Audubon with thousands of dollars for the Native Prairie Island Program for which we partner with the Laramie County Conservation District. Homeowners can call LCCD to request native plant seeds and borrow the seeder to spread them on new septic fields and other areas that need restoration.

            And that brings us back to our own backyards. What are you doing for the birds? Keeping your cats indoors or in a screened outdoor catio? Using motion-activated yard lights to keep nights darker? Using bird-friendly yard and garden practices (look up Habitat Hero online)?

            Are you throwing out hummingbird nectar when it gets cloudy? Good. Make sure you provide nectar that is 1 part regular white granulated sugar to 4 parts water. No dye. No other kinds of sugar. And think about planting more red tubular flowers like red beebalm, Monarda didyma.

Prairie bird safety

The Western Meadowlark, Wyoming’s state bird, nests on the ground, hidden in the prairie grasses. Photo by Mark Gorges.

How to keep prairie birds, and us, safe

“How to keep prairie birds, and us, safe” was published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle Feb. 5, 2022.

By Barb Gorges

            Nurturing the prairie was the theme of this year’s Cheyenne Habitat Heroes workshop held last month. For me, that includes the plants, animals and people.

            Cheyenne sits in the middle of the shortgrass prairie so what we “townies” do matters as well.

            Zach Hutchinson, workshop presenter and community science coordinator for Audubon Rockies, reminded us of the study showing North America has lost 2.9 billion birds, including 53 percent of grassland birds, since 1970. This means that for every 100 birds you could count along a certain distance of our county roads then, today you would only count 47.

            One of the biggest causes is loss of habitat, including the conversion of undeveloped land into subdivisions, commercial property or cropland. Cheyenne is going through a terrific building phase. The landscaping in new high density residential neighborhoods will soon draw in birds, but not the grassland birds. It is the ring of small-acreage landowners around the city who can make a difference.

            First, what shape is the acreage in? Is it full of native prairie grasses and what range managers call forbes, which the rest of us call wildflowers? Or was it overgrazed and is now full of invasive weeds like toadflax and needs renewal?

Another workshop speaker, Aaron Maier, range ecologist for Audubon Rockies, talked at length about regenerative agriculture and how farmers are changing their practices so they spend less on fertilizers and trips with the tractor yet sequester more carbon, capture more moisture and accumulate more beneficial soil microbes.

Aaron also talked about healthy grassland grazing practices benefitting wildlife as well, as laid out by the Audubon Conservation Ranching Initiative. Ranchers following Audubon’s guidelines for best practices for land, wildlife and livestock management are guaranteed premium prices for their product marked as “Audubon Certified.”

But the small acreage owner is probably not going to be grazing cattle. In fact, without 30-36 acres and a seasonal rotation plan, they can’t even graze one horse for one year (without supplemental feed) but must keep them much of the year in a corral to avoid making their entire property into a dust bowl.

Not to say that there aren’t grassland birds that sometimes enjoy bare ground—after all, they evolved alongside the buffalo, famous for creating mosaics of bare ground in their migrations.

A lot of small acreage owners don’t have livestock, but they do have cats and dogs that can be very detrimental to grassland birds. It’s easy to see how, once you realize grassland birds nest on the ground.

The Chestnut-collared Longspur is another grassland ground nester that depends on having vegetation to hide its nest. Photo by Mark Gorges.

Horned larks, western meadowlarks, vesper sparrows, savannah sparrows and other grassland bird species have come up with various ruses and camouflages to avoid native predators. However, they haven’t evolved yet to deal with what the American Bird Conservancy considers to be an invasive species: cats.

Cats kill more than a billion birds a year in the U.S. Zach pointed out that popular “trap, neuter and release” programs have a flaw—they allow cats to go back outside and kill more native birds and small mammals. It’s a touchy subject. I admit to having been the owner of an indoor/outdoor cat up until 1990 when I started keeping my cat indoors. Four cats later, I’m a proponent of catios—screened outdoor areas—and taking leashed cats for walks.

Grassland birds nest sometime between April and July. That’s a good time to keep dogs on a leash so they won’t find and eat bird eggs. And it’s an excellent time to abstain from mowing both the previous year’s and current year’s growth. If you value wildlife, mow only after consulting the professionals over at the Laramie County Conservation District.

However, you may want to forgo much vegetation around your house and outbuildings. The national Firewise program, firewise.org, has guidelines for protecting property from fire on the forest edges as well as in the grasslands.

And what can us townies do for grassland birds? Use less energy. Buy less new stuff. Every energy source I can think of has been detrimental to wildlife: harvesting whale oil, excavating peat, cutting firewood as well as producing the climate-changing fumes of coal, oil and natural gas and the toxic residue of nuclear, and building the cleaner but often habitat and migration-disrupting installments of hydro, wind and solar power.

It seems as soon as we come up with energy saving changes—like families having fewer children and more efficient appliances, someone invents something like the new energy-intensive game of cryptocurrency mining. Don’t mind me, I’m a trifle depressed after watching a new movie, the very dark comedy, “Don’t Look Up.”

But I plan to look up—spring bird  migration will commence any day now.

Barb Gorges is the author of “Cheyenne Birds by the Month,” www.YuccaRoadPress.com.

Horned Larks also are grassland ground nesters. Photo by Mark Gorges.

   

Xxx

Dry Creek habitat restoration

“Dry Creek restoration to improve hydrology, habitat” was published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle Sept. 4, 2021.

Jeff Geyer, Laramie County Conservation District water specialist, explains how a Beaver Dam Analog structure will redirect the flow of Dry Creek and improve the riparian habitat. Photo by Barb Gorges.

By Barb Gorges

            Jeff Geyer is fixing Cheyenne’s Dry Creek.

            First, how did it get its name? Jeff, Laramie County Conservation District water specialist, told me that unlike Crow Creek, our other stream that starts in the mountains, Dry Creek starts somewhere on the F.E. Warren Air Force Base. He said it never had much of a channel, with the water frequently spreading out in flat, temporarily marshy areas and percolating into the water table below as it flowed after a rain or snow event.

            Fast-forward 160 years. The Greenway now follows Dry Creek as it crosses northern Cheyenne west to east, parallel to Dell Range Boulevard. At North College Drive it heads southeast to the new East Park and crosses under I-80. It joins Crow Creek near where the sewage treatment plant is today on Campstool Road.

            What’s changed is the Dry Creek watershed which drains two-thirds of Cheyenne. More land surfaces surrounding the creek have been paved and built on over the last 30 to 40 years as Cheyenne expands. Jeff says you can see the change on Google Earth (use the free Pro version you can download).

            Snowmelt and rainfall aren’t absorbed by pavement and roofs, so they run off into Dry Creek, making much higher flows. Higher flows are faster. Faster flows are straighter. Straighter flows have more energy to erode the soil. Between Campstool and I-80, that energy cut 5-foot deep banks and sent good soil into Crow Creek where it gets deposited in the downstream reservoirs—not good for reservoirs, or the fish in Crow Creek.

            In 2019, Jeff started to fix a small section of Dry Creek that will make a difference. The idea is to slow the creek down by increasing its sinuosity which will reduce the energy of the water. The water flow needs to look more like a traveling snake—looping to one side and then to the other, rather than a straight stick.

            Mathematically, a straight stream has a sinuosity of 1—the ratio of the distance the water travels is 1 to 1 with the length of the valley. Jeff would like to see a sinuosity of 1.2 or 1.4, meaning that in a 100 feet of valley length, the water would loop an extra 20 to 40 feet.

            The banks of a sinuous stream will still erode a bit, but much of the dirt will be deposited in the next curve—slow moving streams can’t carry as much soil suspended in the water.

            While some earth work was required to reduce the 5-foot cutbank in places to give Dry Creek access to the flood plain during rainfall or snowmelt events, much of the sinuosity building is being done with willow stems, logs, posts and stakes.

            At just the right location and angle in the stream bottom, Jeff and volunteers pounded in stakes in a line and then wove willow stems, forming a “Beaver Dam Analog.” The willows were from a nearby location where they die back and new willows continue growing.

The woven willows are like snow fence that slows the wind, making the snow drop out into drifts. This structure slows water carrying dirt so the dirt will drop and form a bar where willows will grow, and their roots will stabilize the stream bed. There is already a nice stand of coyote willows in one spot.

            Up on the flood plain are “Post Assisted Log Structures.” Logs are pinned to the flood plain to make a rough passage that will also slow water down.

Jeff Geyer (left) explains to Mark Gorges (right), a volunteer from Cheyenne Audubon who helped place the Post Assisted Log Structures, how they will slow water flow in the flood zone of Dry Creek. Photo by Barb Gorges.

            Long term, slower stream flow will allow more water around the creek to be absorbed and stored. That underground water flows like surface water and will eventually resurface in the creek, recharging it. Jeff is hoping for a little water to be always in Dry Creek—maybe it will need a new name.

            Changing Dry Creek’s hydrology, Jeff also expects to provide the moisture needed for more diverse vegetation for wildlife habitat. Mule deer and ermine have been seen. Cheyenne Audubon members have been making bird observations. Lorie Chesnut, a member, was instrumental in obtaining a $3000 grant through the National Audubon Society’s Western Water Network Grants this year that paid for the stakes and native plants.   

            As Jeff surveyed the conservation district-managed pasture that surrounds the first phase of the hydrology project (and a second phase that has just begun to the south), he frowned at all the 6-foot-tall mullein stalks and the other non-native weeds. Much more work will be required to transform the pasture into prairie  more useful to ground-nesting birds and other wildlife, bringing it back to its formerly lush and flower-filled self.

Conservation Ranching for the birds–and cows

Greater Sage-Grouse lekking with cattle in the background on sagebrush-steppe habitat on Bureau of Land Management land leased by Pathfinder Ranches in Natrona County, Wyoming. March 28, 2019. Photo by Evan Barrientos, Audubon Rockies. Courtesy.

Published Dec. 15, 2019, Wyoming Tribune Eagle, “Conservation Ranching is for the birds–and the cows”

By Barb Gorges

             You’ll run across arguments saying our farmlands would be put to better use raising food crops for people instead of forage crops for cattle. Maybe so—back east.

            But Wyoming’s remaining rangeland, its prairie grasslands and shrublands, is not suited to raising crops. We don’t have the water or the soils. But we do grow excellent native forage, originally for buffalo, now for cattle.

            And what a great system it is—no fossil fuels required to harvest that forage—the animals do it for you! On top of that, good range management is good for birds.

However, grassland birds were identified as the group having declined the most in the past 48 years, https://www.3billionbirds.org/.

At a recent Cheyenne Audubon meeting, Dusty Downey, Audubon Rockies’ lead for its Conservation Ranching Initiative, explained part of the problem is grassland conversion. When ranchers can’t make enough on cattle, they might try converting rangeland to cropland or to houses and other infrastructure. With hard work, cropland can be restored someday, but houses are a permanent conversion and wildlife suffers habitat loss.

Eighty-five percent of grasslands and sagebrush steppe is privately owned. So Dusty, raised on and still living on a ranch by Devils Tower, and his boss, Alison Holloran, a wildlife biologist, thought reaching out to ranchers about enhancing their operations could benefit both birds and cattle. Offering a financial incentive makes it attractive and might keep land in ranching.

National Audubon picked up the idea and made it a national program. The “Grazed on Audubon Certified Bird Friendly Land” logo can help ranchers get anywhere from 10 to 40 cents per pound more, depending on the market.

Conservation ranching is now popular in Dusty’s Thunder Basin neighborhood where ranchers know him and his family. Through the program, ranchers learn techniques for maximizing production over the long term that also benefit birds and they get help finding funding for ranch improvements. With third party certification, they earn the privilege of selling their meat at a premium price to people like me who value their commitment.

We also value meat free of hormones and antibiotics, so that is part of the certification. And we appreciate that cows eating grass produce less methane, part of the climate change problem, than if they eat corn.

Dusty said in the last 15 years, grass-fed beef sales have grown 400 percent, from $5 million a year to $2 billion.

Audubon-certified beef is available at Big Hollow Food Coop in Laramie, http://www.laramiecoop.com/, the Reed Ranch in Douglas, tombevreed@gmail.com, in Colorado, other western states and online. See https://www.audubon.org/where-buy-products-raised-audubon-certified-land#.

Grazing prairie looks simple. But grazing management is both art and science.

What does the vegetation need? How is it interacting with weather and grazers? Grassland vegetation needs grazing to stay healthy. Dusty cited a four-year study that showed an ungrazed pasture was not as productive or as diverse as one that had been grazed properly. Grazed plots showed five times more birds, two times more arthropods (food for chicks) and five times more dung beetles (the compost experts) than ungrazed plots.

Grazing grasslands down to bare ground like the buffalo did looks bad, but in the right context it allows highly nutritious plants to grow that can’t compete otherwise. It also aids bird species that require bare ground or very short grass somewhere in their lifecycle, between courtship and fledging.

My experience with prairie plants in the Habitat Hero demonstration garden at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens showed plants grazed down to ground level by rabbits rebounded the next spring. But you can’t let the rabbits in year-round or the same season year after year.

The gold standard when I was studying range management at the University of Wyoming was rest-rotation grazing. Now it’s producing a changing mosaic of plants by adjusting grazing timing on a multi-year cycle for any given pasture, tailored to the plants there and the rancher’s goals. Laramie County Conservation District helps local landowners figure it out, https://www.lccdnet.org/.

For an elegant explanation of the dance between animal and prairie plant, read a recent blog post by Chris Helzer, https://prairieecologist.com/2019/11/13/what-does-habitat-look-like-on-a-ranch/. He is the director of science for The Nature Conservancy-Nebraska.

Chris talks about growing a shifting mosaic of plants that will be more resilient through drought and other extremes. He also said, “Chronic overgrazing can degrade plant communities and reduce habitat quality, but a well-managed ranch can foster healthy wildlife populations while optimizing livestock production.”

Next time you meet a rancher, restaurant owner or grocery store manager, ask them if they’ve heard about Audubon’s Conservation Ranching Initiative. Tell them it’s good for birds—and cows.