For more than 20 years now, I’ve covered a route on Martha’s Vineyard that is part of the U.S. Geologic Survey’s Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) project. Now 60 years old, this continent-wide, long-term monitoring program includes about 3,000 routes, each 25 miles long and consisting of 50 three-minute stops spaced a half-mile apart. The vastness of the resulting data set smooths out local and short-term variability, and the BBS may be the single most powerful project for monitoring bird populations in North America.
The Vineyard route, which I inherited from local birding legend Vern Laux, begins at Lobsterville, winds around Aquinnah, and then northeast along State and North Roads, takes Old County Road south through West Tisbury, and ends with several stops (usually plagued by traffic noise) on the West Tisbury Road. I’ve learned to run the route only on Sunday mornings, since traffic is often unworkably persistent on other mornings, and for year-to-year consistency, I cover it, conditions permitting, on the Sunday morning closest to June 10.
Thus it was that the predawn half-light of June 8 found me fending off mosquitos on the roadside in Aquinnah, counting the songs of the towhees, common yellowthroats, and song sparrows that abound in the scrubby growth of the Lobsterville Tribal Lands. Light ground mist, not really ideal, didn’t seem to affect bird activity; indeed, the still, moist air carried the sounds of bird songs clearly over long distances. After all these years, I slip readily into the routine: The three-minute count period, a brief moment of record-keeping, then back into the car for the quick drive to the next stop.
This year’s iteration of the survey produced a mix of encouraging and depressing results. On the bright side, the willow flycatchers that have nested for decades now along Moshup Trail were still there, with the male singing vigorously. Many common species, such as gray catbird, Eastern towhee, and common yellowthroat, were everywhere, with many stops revealing multiple individuals of each species.
A belted kingfisher flew past my stop at the State Road overlook at Menemsha Pond. This species, which typically nests in bluffs and banks along water bodies, is a regular if uncommon breeder on the Island. But it’s a species that is rarely detected on my route. And elsewhere, in West Tisbury, I heard the hoarse croak of a common raven — the first time this species, recently established in small numbers of the Vineyard, has made it onto my BBS tally.
More ominously, though, my years-long wood thrush drought continued, with this formerly uncommon but regular breeder going totally undetected. The decline of this species is probably not a local issue; ample excellent habitat still exists. So it’s likely that a loss of suitable wintering habitat in the Neotropics is reducing the overwinter survival of this songbird. Likewise, I failed to see or hear a scarlet tanager, another bird that has steadily grown less regular on this survey route. And unaccountably, swallows of all kinds were scarce, with barn and Northern rough-winged swallows missed entirely, and tree and bank swallows represented by just a few individuals. I have no explanation for that, and hope it was just a peculiarity of this particular day.
I’m aware that I will eventually age out of this activity. Loss of high-frequency hearing is the bane of older birders, and since the vast majority of BBS detections are of songs or calls rather than of birds actually seen, it will ultimately render me unable to do this job properly. Annual hearing tests, however, have been encouragingly consistent, and for now, I’m confident that my ears are fully up to the task.
Another issue for older birders can simply be a loss of physical vigor, and the sort of cognitive slowing that nearly everyone experiences eventually. This year, I was a bit dismayed by an uncharacteristic error: I turned a data sheet, which lists birds heard or seen, in separate columns for separate stops, prematurely. That left two columns blank; all subsequent stops were recorded in the wrong columns; and as I approached the end of the route, I realized that I had no columns available for the final two stops.
The error is a minor one. Those final two stops rarely produce anything except a high count of passing cars, and when I submit my data online, I can easily adjust for the error. But still, I had to wonder if this was the first sign that I’m losing my fieldwork fastball.
But the longevity of my own birding skills may not be the biggest worry. The BBS, along with many other wildlife monitoring projects, is part of a governmental unit proposed for elimination by the current regime in Washington. If that happens, I hope that the valuable existing data can migrate elsewhere, and that some other entity can take on managing the BBS. The information it supplies is too precious to lose.
