Restoration | Wild Bird Chase (part 2)
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Catherine Devine 00:13 Hey everyone, welcome back to Sea to Trees. I'm your host Catherine Devine. Remember the naturalist from our last episode who was on a mission to record all the bird songs in Acadia, Laura Sebastianelli? This episode starts with her.
Laura Sebastianelli 00:40 you know, you'll see Redwing blackbirds chase off, you know, other birds that they you know, they do not want near their nest, you know. And you'll see that you know, anywhere with little birds chasing off the bigger birds usually a bird of prey or something, you know, they're like, "Get out of here." They're protecting their nest from predators.
Catherine Devine 01:03 My time with Laura was my first time birding. Laura let me try out her parabolic microphone. Great for capturing sounds in the distance.
Laura Sebastianelli 01:15 Okay, go ahead and pop these headphones out
Catherine Devine 01:26 Yeah, it's so clear, and it can hear everything from water.
Laura Sebastianelli 01:30 The water. There are better mics for this situation for ambient soundscape. You would use a different mic that has a wider field of target where a parabola is highly focused.
Catherine Devine 01:47 I popped the headphones on. It felt like the rest of the world dimmed for a moment. It was just me and the birds and the natural world. We stopped by a wetland at the base of Champlain Mountain near the Precipice Trail to see if we could hear the American Bittern. A bird Laura has been trying to record for a while now,
Laura Sebastianelli 02:08 because it's very difficult to walk in this area. I haven't spent a lot of time recording here. I always stop if it's early in the morning because I know that there are American bittern in here, which have a really wonderful sound, but I've never, I've never been able to capture it here. I heard it once here but you know, it wasn't able to record it.
Catherine Devine 02:35 and then... we heard it. This sort of gulping guttural swallow. Laura crept through the marsh weaving through trees and paths spider webs steep into the thick grassy meadow quick and quiet on her feet. She turned and shushed me. She needed absolute silence to record. I watched her collect tape from a distance. She stood absolutely still. Holding her large microphone out in front of her waiting to hear the Bitterns call. She captured the tape she had been searching for. But good tape can always be better tape.
Laura Sebastianelli 03:30 Like any bird that I'm recording, if this is this is good, but so is a chance we can get closer. I don't have headphones on, so I can't like venture out there. But what we can do is follow the trail and see is there's a better vantage point for it. This is stop number one, get anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes and then do very short little thing so this is how we're gonna get here. Well let's see if we can get in another position for getting a closer sound recording.
Catherine Devine 04:02 And for the next hour or so we followed Laura around. Dashing and stopping and waiting and listening. Over and over and over again until she got it. The best, clearest closest recording of the American Bittern that she could muster, but I was a little confused. I didn't quite understand why getting this recording was so important. What's so special about the American Bittern?
Laura Sebastianelli 04:30 There aren't a lot to begin with up here. So, about once you hear the song through the headphones, I hope you do. You'll understand how cool and unusual it is. You hear it gulping and then make vocalizing and it's just it's just it's just a great sound and they're so secretive, otherwise, the you would never find it. I mean, their masterful camouflage.
Catherine Devine 05:10 Laura wasn't trying to record the bittern and for any particular reason. It wasn't that special to her. Laura saw the uniqueness in all birds, in all of nature.
Laura Sebastianelli 05:21 I think listening to birds, inspires people period. Birds inspire us. I think that's part of the connection.
05:31 The American Bittern population along with the population of many birds in and around Acadia National Park, is rapidly declining, mainly due to habitat loss, which unfortunately is a common tale in bird conservation. One of the biggest conservation projects taking place at Schoodic Institute is a partnership with Friends of Acadia and the National Park Service. The project seeks to restore wetland habitat functions, and see if that has an impact on the bird population. It takes place at the Great Meadow, a wetland that's been pretty disturbed. And because of that, it's pretty disturbing. Chris Nadeau, the Climate Change Adaptation Scientist at Schoodic Institute. Give me a quick rundown.
Brooke Goodman 06:16 So the Great Meadow although it looks like this beautiful wetland, when you drive by some of the overlooks - It is a beautiful wetland, it doesn't just look like a beautiful wetland - It's actually a really disturbed landscape. And so water doesn't flow through the wetland in a way it naturally should. And so the water, there's a lot of old roadbeds that go through the wetland that stop the water from flowing through. There's a lot of ditching in the wetland that actually causes the water to leave the wetland faster than it should. And then the big issue right now is that there's a really undersized culvert at the outlet of the wetland that actually allows water out too fast during dry spells. And so the way its just too dry, and during wet periods, it actually doesn't let water out fast enough. And so the wetland floods really deep. And so the park is about to go through a big resource management project to try to fix those hydrologic issues with the water. And so they're going to be breaching some of those old roads to allow the water to flow through, they're going to be plugging those ditches so that the water doesn't drain quickly. And they're going to be replacing that undersized culvert with a much bigger 12 foot culvert to restore the natural hydrology in that wetland. And so what we're interested in from a scientific perspective is whether those hydrologic changes that are going to happen in the wetland will affect the bird community in Great Meadow. And so, you know, birds are one of the biggest resources in that wetland. So a lot of people go to the Great Meadow specifically to bird watch. And so we want to know if they're going to change the way the water moves through the wetland, does that change the bird community? And so to do that, we’re using autonomous recording units, which are just the small recorders that record bird calls at certain times of the day. We've put them out in a few different places in Great Meadow, and then we've put them out in another wetland that's really similar to great meadow. It's called Gilmore Meadow. It has, it's really similar but the hydrology is a little more natural in Gilmore meadow. So we put some recording units out there too as a reference wetland. And this year, what we're really doing is just collecting baseline data before we make any hydrologic changes to see does the bird community kind of differ between those two wetlands and then in the future, we'll go back once the hydrology has changed. We'll put the autonomous recording units out again and we'll see if has the bird community shifted in Great Meadow because of the hydrologic changes.
Catherine Devine 08:47 So researchers at Schoodic Institute are trying to figure out what impact hydrologic changes in Great Meadow will have on the birds and Acadia. This is such a daunting task. This is where Brooke Goodman comes in, the Cathy and Jim Gero Acadia Early-Career Fellow in Science Research at Schoodic Institute.
Brooke Goodman 09:07 I'm in charge of our bioacoustics projects in the park.
09:11 Oh, and by the way, bio acoustics is the study of the production, transmission, and reception of animal sounds. Most of Brooke's work centers on these square box shaped containers called ARU's autonomous recording units. ARU's are these really sturdy recording devices that are used to record animals for long periods of time.
Brooke Goodman 09:32 So I'm holding a Swift One from the Cornell Lab and this is an ARU or autonomous recording unit. And what I can do with this is just put it out in the meadow and I can leave it out for a month or two months or however long as I want. And it will record data for me on an SD card. So it's a really effective way to capture bird data without having to go out into those wetlands every week or something to do a point count, which can be really difficult. So it helps us get a really good snapshot of what birds are in the meadow. And since there's no human out there counting them, we don't need to worry about our presence influencing their vocalization or what's around
10:15 Brooke spends her days going to different spots in Acadia, and setting up these ARUs by wrapping them around tree trunks or posts. In order to capture the birds in the area.
Brooke Goodman 10:24 We chose a bunch of sites to put up ARUs. And it's similar to point count where you want them to be like 350 meters apart, and you don't want them to record the same birds. And you have to figure out how long you actually want to put it out for. So for ours, we're putting it out for around a month on a 24 hour recording schedule. So our ARUs are recording like all day every day collecting a ton of data.
10:49 And this is where the Great Meadow restoration project fits in. Brooke's placed
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