Breeding Birds
The breeding season is a nonstop flurry of activity for birds, as they work through the arduous tasks of establishing a territory in the best habitat, attracting a mate, building a nest, laying and incubating eggs, raising multiple young, and in many cases doing it all over again right away to try and produce the most offspring before the end of summer. All this while fending off neighbors and interlopers, avoiding predators, and finding a time to molt all their feathers before heading south again for the winter (if you’re a migrant). As a result of all these energy-demanding activities, it’s critical that they have access to the best natural resources available. Metroparks hosts breeding grounds for numerous species of conservation concern, so in order to ensure we are providing the best resources, we have several breeding bird monitoring programs in place.
Our district-wide breeding bird survey program consists of over 150 survey locations, where Metroparks staff and volunteers perform 5-minute stationary point counts of all species and individuals seen or heard within a given radius. These survey locations are distributed throughout all parks and habitat types, for a representative sample of the avian communities breeding in our Metroparks. The data collected annually through these surveys helps drive our adaptive management strategies, ensuring management actions are improving habitat for bird species of conservation concern.
In addition to our district-wide monitoring, we also coordinate several species-specific monitoring efforts. The first and most critical of these is our breeding Lark Sparrow monitoring, carried out by long-term, dedicated volunteers. The Oak Openings region is home to the easternmost population of Lark Sparrows in the country, a spatially isolated population that is listed as Endangered in Ohio. Many of these sparrows breed in the dry sand prairies of the Oak Openings Preserve, and Metroparks keeps a close eye on their breeding success.
Other breeding bird surveys coordinated and conducted by Metroparks staff include annual Nightjar Survey Network [details] routes in the Oak Openings, for tracking Eastern Whip-poor-will breeding activity; and the Lucas County portion of the Ohio Crane Count, an annual one-day census of all Sandhill Cranes in Ohio. The state-wide crane census is coordinated by the Ohio Division of Wildlife and Ohio Bird Conservation Initiative, with volunteer coordinators in many counties and hundreds of volunteers across the state searching for cranes on one morning in April. Lucas County consistently ranks among the top three counties in the state for numbers of Sandhill Cranes, with hotspots at Howard Marsh Metropark and several sites in the Oak Openings Region. For more information visit Ohio Crane Count.