I’ve only got a few weeks left with the BLM, so I’ve packed in the field surveys and am holed up in the office going through my data.

Not that being at the office is a bad thing.

(Also incorporating some sightings that my co-workers have passed along over the course of the season—thanks guys!) So far, I have learned the following:

• First and foremost, always err on the side of recording more information. Wyoming published an updated State Wildlife Action Plan last week, and five of the birds I’ve gathered data on have coincidentally been added to its list of Species of Greatest Conservation Need. My boss/mentor, Destin, and I have confirmed that two of them are breeding successfully in the Cody region, and we have at least a rough baseline for the locations and habitats where all five can currently be found. Both of those things may turn out to be important if the Game and Fish Department decides to start managing them more actively.
• On average, half of the species observed at a sagebrush or grassland site are likely to be birds of conservation concern (BCC), for either the Bureau or the state of Wyoming. Considering the condition of a lot of shrub- and grasslands, even in states like Wyoming without a lot of urban or cultivated areas, this was not a great shock.
• Montane forests and riparian sites typically host a smaller proportion of BCC (usually about a third), but are sometimes (not always) more diverse overall. (Interestingly, you can use the sagebrush/grassland data to estimate the number of BCC at a montane or riparian site, by plugging the total species count into the regression formula, and subtracting 1 from the predicted BCC.)
• The number of species observed at a site tends to be highest in midmorning (between 7:00 and 10:00 AM), with temperatures in the 50s, or in late June/early July, but only the first factor seems to have a reliable effect.* Longer survey times can yield more species, but this relationship was surprisingly weak too. (A big caveat here: at least a few times, I stayed longer at a site because I wasn’t seeing or hearing very much…or because I was recording more species than usual and wanted to make sure I was identifying the unfamiliar ones correctly.)
• The very edge of the sage sparrow’s range passes through the Cody jurisdiction: south of the Shoshone River and east of the McCullough Peaks, they show up fairly regularly, while I almost never saw them in the northwestern part of the basin. The applications of this knowledge are limited for now, but it should make any range shifts in future years (due to climate or habitat change) easier to detect and potentially respond to. Unfortunately, because of sage sparrows’ high fidelity to their home territories (see my last post), reductions in range are the most likely change that would occur.
• Many of the other species I’ve been recording out here are, in one way or another, somewhat resilient to habitat changes or human disturbance, but their exact responses to those influences vary in interesting ways. Sage thrashers (see my last post) and loggerhead shrikes seem more tolerant of oil and gas development than Brewer’s sparrows are, but thrashers may take several years longer to recover from wildfires than Brewer’s do, and shrikes remain absent from burned sites even after twenty years or more. (Then again, shrikes are absent from a lot of areas: the populations in the sagebrush region don’t seem to be experiencing the 90% losses that have been observed farther east, but they’re by no means common.) Lark sparrows (another BCC) actually seem to prefer habitat within oil fields, but I don’t have enough data points to be really confident about them.
• Mountain plovers’ preference for settling on prairie dog colonies appears to be just as strong here as it is on the high Plains, despite the differences between the prairie dog species in terms of colony layout and habitat impacts. On the other hand, shrikes and lark sparrows were almost always found away from colonies; if that pattern is a sign of active preferences on their part, rather than a product of chance, I have no idea what it could be based on. (Rock wrens were also far more common away from colonies, but they tend to hang around cliff faces and rock outcrops, which are difficult to burrow in.)

White-tailed prairie dog, the main species in central and western Wyoming.

And the final piece of news: I have been hearing lazuli buntings singing ALL SUMMER without realizing what they were. (Naturally, they’re a BCC too, although not a high-priority one.) In my defense, there’s so much variation between individual males’ songs that studying the recordings more diligently this spring would have been only a little help, and because I never actually saw any, I often didn’t recognize them as the same species.

*For example, all of the sage/grassland surveys where eight or more species were observed started before 10:05; all of the surveys where only one species was observed started after 10:30 (and often had temperatures in the 80s or 90s). R² was only 0.068 for survey start time vs. species count, and even lower for temperature, but I think it still supports the conventional wisdom about what makes for good birding conditions. Neither of these factors was as important at montane or riparian sites, so in retrospect, retreating to those areas later in the day might have allowed me to gather more data points for more species.