If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ve probably run across reference to Audubon’s release of the 2007 State of the Birds. With a quarter of North America’s avian species in decline, it’s not hard to believe that 10% of bird species will be extinct by 2100.

Audubon’s unprecedented analyses of forty years of bird population data from Christmas Bird Count and Breeding Bird Survey reveals alarming declines for many of our most common and beloved birds. Since 1967 the average population for the common birds in steepest decline has fallen 68 percent, from 17.6 million to 5.35 million. Some species have nose-dived as much as 80 percent and all 20 birds included in the Common Birds in Decline report have lost at least 50 percent of their population - in just four decades.

Of the 654 avian species native to the continental US, Audubon finds 178 species (and 39 in Hawaii) that are “in need of immediate conservation help.” You can find lists of these species at Audubon’s 2007 WatchList page.

Since I had observed a Cerulean Warbler (these are so unmistakeable even I can identify them) this past spring, I selected to review that from the above link. This species receives a yellow status flag - declining or rare - rather than the red flag which indicates species “declining rapidly and/or have very small populations or limited ranges, and face major conservation threats.” Cerulean Warblers have declined 4.5% per year since 1966, and would therefore be at about 25% of the population 30 years ago.

Cerulean Warblers (according to the Audubon page) are migratory,flocking to the Andes and forests of northern South America, while breeding in the eastern half of the US. As a species requiring two homes, they’re in double jeopardy. Their winter grounds are disappearing through coca and coffee bean farming, and their moderately demanding requirements for breeding grounds here are disappearing through urban encroachment. Here they require mature hardwood forests with open understories, and so it’s neither surprising that they’re having difficulty nor that I happened to spot one. The hollow that runs 1000 feet along SBS creek, with its mature deciduous oaks, tulip poplars, beeches, and its diverse understory, is exactly what they need.

That brings us back to my "managment post" of a few days ago, since other parts of the property are *not* exactly what they, and others, need. Surely we can do better.

To accomplish this, I needed to first identify the problem, which is a poorly managed area low in plant and animal diversity. I then had to figure out what was suitable modification, which should be gradual and yet not too gradual, and should result in a higher diversity of plants, in particular, and as quickly as possible. How to prepare for it, and then how to achieve it is the key, and it seems to devolve upon opening the area up to sunlight and to remove nonproductive plants. I’m being informed by a vast amount of information on the internets. Let me share it with you.

Here is small portion of an extraordinary map of potential conservation opportunities in Georgia, and I start with this because we’re always looking for resources of plant species. I found it on the Department of Natural Resources Conservation Opportunity Areas page, and obtained a higher resolution version from one of the folks who produced the map. (At that website is also a word document detailing how the map was produced.)

The red square indicates our area, and you can see a blowup of that along with legible legends by clicking on the map.


Much of Oglethorpe County is given over to agricultural development, soon to give way to suburban development, and I suppose we could indicate all that area in white. But there are certainly some interesting patches here and there. The map doesn’t show relatively small areas of conservation, including easements and other private protection initiatives. It divides by way of color codes into natural vegetation occupying more or less contiguous area and further divides by the presence of species of concern. (Plant species, by the way.) The yellow patches in the lower left corner constitute the Oconee National Forest. In south Athens-Clarke County is the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, another conserved area.

What this map doesn’t show is urban encroachment - the white areas sort of imply it. Athens-Clarke County, for instance is now largely nothing but urban and suburban space. My guess is that information of this sort is available in one form or another, wherever you live. I happened to find it on our state’s Department of Natural Resources site.

Even if you can’t find that, you can go to a site like this one to at least identify the ecoregions that are imagined to exist. Clicking on that third map and holding the mouse over the pinkish region over northeast Georgia shows us to live in Ecoregion 231, the Southeastern Mixed Forest Province, with a modestly detailed description of climate and major plant and animal species. Another link from this site goes to the US Forest Service’s description of the ecological subregions, which are similarly numbered.

That site also includes information on Canada, but the full link does not work. A higher level URL gets you to the top level page at the National Water Research Institute site.

Yesterday I mentioned another resource that might have analogs available to you. I’ve been using this fine list of Flora of the Oconee National Forest for some time, and as I mentioned yesterday, have adapted it to excel now. The tags I placed allowed me to produce a subset spreadsheet of 265 local plant species found in oak-pine and pine barren environments. I’ve placed that excel file here. These would include the species I’d target for acquiring and planting.

If you have a national forest, or even a large or national state park near you, it’s likely that someone has gone in there and done a plant species count. It’s just a matter of finding it.

One of the reasons that all the above are important is that they give you an idea of the native species, especially of plants, that you’d find in an open understory. These are the very things you want to plant, so you have to get them from somewhere. The easiest thing is to visit similar areas and judiciously harvest seed to use in planting nuclei that will then spread. It’s a longer term strategy but has the advantage of providing a broader range of species than you might find otherwise.

It might surprise you that Georgia has a fairly active set of wildlife conservation programs that fit in with its wildlife conservation strategy. Part of this strategy is to provide incentives to get private landowners involved in private protection and management. The incentives include modest contributing monies toward management for a set period of time, as well as free expert advice and in some cases, assistance.

If Georgia, not the most progressive state in the union, has incentive programs, it’s likely that yours has even better ones.

Here’s an example of a (large - most backyards don’t have a visitor center!) backyard sanctuary (pdf). It has all the elements that you’d want to incorporate into a larger program, especially forest margins for cover, and high plant diversity (yes!). Water is certainly a nice feature to provide. Even a small thousand-gallon lined pond as a cistern would work well in a smaller project. (Make it deep, though, three feet at least, to keep deer from wading.)

This pdf, from UTK, emphasizes grasses. Consequently it goes into controlled burnings in management, and use of native grasses. The easy way, quick way to provide a grassy habitat is to clearcut and then plant commercially available grasses. These may not be the most suitable for the area, and they may not be clumping grasses. Clumping species do not spread by runners, and so do not cover the ground, thereby leaving space for other forbs. Conventional running grasses may look nice, sort of like a lawn, but tend to take over and do not really produce the seeds of high food quality.

The Alabama Cooperative Extension System provides this management pdf, which serves for me as more of a template. It lists a lot of important native plants that provide food and cover. Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana), which we have in abundance, is said to provide food for 240 songbird species. At the very beginning it shows an early succession forest much like ours, and points out the low diversity of the poor understory and highly shaded conditions.

From the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service comes this fire management pdf, which points out the advantages and disadvantages of using fire to keep secondary succession under control. The very first photograph (and a later one) illustrates a main point that is relevant to our situation. It doesn’t do much good to use fire unless you have pines (in this case) that are quite large, and it doesn’t do much good if there’s a lot of smaller unthinned understory trees to begin with. Without mechanical thinning, especially of undesirable hardwood saplings, the canopy will still be too dense for light to get through and the advantages of fire will be unrealized.

This turns out to be our scenario, whether or not we choose to use fire occasionally. The large loblollies mostly stay. Their canopy is high enough, and the trees are spaced far enough apart, so that sunlight is not prevented from reaching the ground. The loblolly canopy, by the way, is also where our red-tailed hawks nest, and we don’t want to interfere with that.

In comments to the earlier management post, Bill asked:

Your thoughts on predicted dynamic between animal and plant kingdoms, once you attain your objective? [I’m now slowly transitioning to a what-will-it-take-to-preserve-the-indigenous-avian [and migratory] perspective.]

In partial answer to that, the first thing is that this will be, of necessity, a gradual transition. Like the strip-harvesting strategy designed to preserve tropical rainforests, there will always be attached unmanaged area for refuge as adjacent areas change.

The second thing is that the disturbance will be fairly low key. Initially I am simply thinning out undesirable sapwood of relatively small but highly dense growth. I’ll leave behind larger trees well-separated from each other, as well as smaller desirable ones (dogwoods, maples, oaks). I’ll begin planting nuclei of grasses, forbs, vines, and certain species of trees. (The easy way to do it would be to clearcut and plant some rapidly spreading grass, but that would be a mistake, I think.)

That will be where the first dynamic begins to play out - our eternal war with the deer. Much of what I plant will have to be initially protected, but many of my choices will be deer-resistant (nothing is deer proof). The avians that are now there, the red-tailed hawks and various songbirds, should be unaffected, both because of untreated refuge areas adjacent, and because the “undesirable sapwoods” hypothetically have little value to them other than cover.

In a few years, as grasses and forbs begin to take hold, I’d expect the dynamic to become much more interesting. There should be more species and numbers of avians, smaller mammals, and reptiles, and predatory avians should have better hunting. I’m certainly aiming for an environment suitable for quail and other ground-nesting birds, but that may be a result out of my reach, both for reasons of the relatively small coverage area and perhaps the difficulty in maintaining a diverse open woodland. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it but the initial strategy seems to be a sound, sine qua non one, that leaves a good deal of flexibility ahead of us.