The Cerulean Warbler has lost two percent of its population annually, culminating in an 80 percent drop since the mid-1960s. Photo by Michael J. Parr. All photos courtesy of American Bird Conservancy.
The Cerulean Warbler has lost two percent of its population annually, culminating in an 80 percent drop since the mid-1960s. Photo by Michael J. Parr.
All photos courtesy of American Bird Conservancy.
American Bird Conservancy and the Appalachian Mountains Joint Venture
Few migratory birds in the Western Hemisphere have been squeezed at both ends of their range as much as the Cerulean Warbler.
These sprites of the high canopy – the adult males are sky blue, hence the name, and the females are a bluish green – breed mostly in the heart of the Appalachians, one of the world’s oldest mountain ranges. From northern Alabama to New Brunswick, Canada, it stretches more than two thousand miles. It’s an ancient range with a history stretching back nearly 500 million years. Ceruleans need mature forests dominated by white oaks, sugar maple, poplar, and hickory, with tall trees and large openings or gaps in the canopy. But those forest openings rarely happen naturally anymore, and it is fair to say that, given the drastic decline in their population, Ceruleans can’t afford to wait. To the eye, Appalachian forests appear healthy, with large trees that carpet the ridges. But these forests aren’t as healthy as they look. As a result of aggressive logging in the early 20th century, and little sustainable forest management since, their trees are largely the same size and same age. The result is very little structural diversity, an understory or mid-story starved of sunlight by an oak-dominated canopy or eaten away by legions of white-tailed deer. Mountaintop removal mining, a devastating form of surface mining that removes the tops of mountains to access seams of coal within, has further reduced the Cerulean’s breeding habitat.
The addition of canopy gaps in this Pennsylvania forest has allowed sunlight to reach the forest floor and new plants to grow, slowly creating the structural diversity that the Cerulean Warbler thrives in. Photo by Liz Brewer.
They’re also long-distance migrants, crossing the Gulf of Mexico in spring and fall between their breeding and wintering grounds. Their winter home is located within a narrow band of the temperate eastern foothills of the Andes, from Venezuela south to Bolivia, where lush forests have, in recent decades, been leveled to make room for pastures and farms, of which many grow coffee or coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine. Ceruleans were once among the most abundant breeding warblers in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, but, add up the habitat changes and other threats they face, and the tragic picture is of the fastest-declining warbler species in the Western Hemisphere. The species has lost two percent of its population annually, culminating in an 80 percent drop since the mid-1960s, according to Breeding Bird Survey data.
But the Appalachian Mountains Joint Venture (AMJV), administered by American Bird Conservancy (ABC), is familiar with long odds, and in those Appalachian forests, AMJV staff are working with biologists and foresters on the ground to help turn around the decline. Their work emphasizes creating alliances, working with private landowners, and managing the landscape in a way that mimics the natural habitat that once enabled the Cerulean Warbler – and other at-risk or threatened migratory birds – to be more numerous. The AMJV, one of 21 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Joint Ventures in the U.S., is a regional partnership of over 55 state and federal agencies, conservation organizations, and universities.
Since ABC’s founding in 1994, its mission has been to conserve wild birds and their habitats throughout the Americas, from the breeding and nonbreeding grounds to the migratory stopover sites that connect them. ABC has been at the forefront of Cerulean Warbler conservation for over two decades, from the first Cerulean Warbler Technical Group (CWTG) in 2001, which sought to address the urgent management of the species’ breeding and wintering habitats, to several studies and summits that followed in West Virginia, Ecuador, and Colombia. ABC’s Todd Fearer, the coordinator of the AMJV, now chairs this group.
Around five acres of this West Virginia forest was transitioned to young forest to create habitat for the Golden-winged Warbler. This photo was taken the first spring after the cut took place. Already tulip-poplar, locust, oaks, and a multitude of shrubs and herbaceous plants that were once dormant in the seed bank now can grow. Photo by Liz Brewer.
The Golden-winged Warbler requires specific breeding habitat: It needs young forests or brushy wetland openings within mixed-age deciduous forests, also known as early-successional forest. Photo by Michael J. Parr.
Alabama is one of America’s most biodiverse states, with landscapes ranging from its Gulf Coast migratory pit-stop to plateau country in the north, from coastal plain to mountains, and in between the rolling plains of the Black Belt region. Except Ansel Payne, the executive director of the 75-year-old Alabama Audubon, believes relatively few birders and nature lovers are aware of that – a realization he himself came to only fairly recently.
“I think the truth is, if people were only thinking about birds and nature, this would be on every birder’s wishlist,” he says. “There are just too many good things to see in one spot. Where else can you see Cerulean Warblers and then drive a couple hours and see Painted Buntings and Scissor-tailed Flycatchers?”
He pauses. “Nowhere!”
Payne moved to Alabama in the summer of 2015 after his wife received a professorship at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He grew up in West Virginia, an hour north of Charleston, attended college in New England, and continued his studies at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. A year into his Alabama residence, he got a job as a naturalist for Alabama Audubon, and months later became its outreach director. He’s now a champion for the state and its birds.
Dave Ewert doing field research in The Bahamas, where Kirtland's Warblers winter.
Photo courtesy of ABC.
“I was hesitant to move here, frankly. Here’s the thing, though,” he says. “People have to overcome what they think Alabama means to them. That’s our history. I wish people would recognize the complexity of the state, and how so many of the terrible stories of American history happened here, but also the heroic response to those terrible stories also happened here.”
Birmingham Audubon Society, as the organization was known when Payne joined (he led its name change last year), had been run by dedicated volunteers until 2013, but with significant support from the estate of a local family, it has grown its staff and its ambitions. With federal and state money, too, it opened a field office on the Gulf Coast to manage the protection and monitoring of beach-nesting birds there. Payne became executive director in the spring of 2018; their staff is now up to 10 employees, with several coastal biologists plus a conservation director.
“I think we’re developing a reputation as a national leader among Audubon organizations,” he says.
LaFond saw the need to do something. In 2010, while volunteering on a local winter raptor survey, she learned about a large parcel of farmland that was going to be sold and subdivided into tract housing, fragmenting the unbroken habitat that grassland birds need to survive. A few years earlier, New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) had purchased almost 300 acres of critical habitat within the IBA in Fort Edward, and they were considering protecting another 180 acres, but town officials opposed further acquisitions. The state did not pay taxes on the land – although it was open to it, since it did so already in the Catskills and Adirondacks – and the town worried about that financial loss.
LaFond realized that a non-profit land trust was needed. She founded the Friends of the IBA, which would later be renamed Grassland Bird Trust, and in 2011 the organization held its first event, a Winter Raptor Fest. More than a thousand people showed up at a large dairy barn in the middle of snow-covered grasslands. Buoyed by this support, LaFond sprung into action.
Part of that reputation comes from their efforts to make Alabama Audubon more representative of the state. For decades, Payne says, the organization would run field trips to the Black Belt Prairie Region, or Black Belt, a crescent-shaped, biologically and geologically distinct area that extends from southwestern Tennessee through east-central Mississippi and then across central Alabama. The Black Belt owes its name to its rich soil but also the agricultural slave economy that grew there because of this fertile land. Later, Civil Rights struggles played out in towns like Selma and Greensboro. Today, it remains extremely poor.
“This region is characterized by weathered rolling plains of relatively low relief developed on chalk and marl of the Cretaceous Selma chalk,” according to one ecological assessment. “Historically, the natural communities of the Black Belt consisted of a mosaic of various hardwood and mixed hardwood/pine forests, chalk outcrops and prairies.”
Kirtland's Warbler. Photo by Joel Trick, USFWS.
To learn more about the organization and its efforts, as well as to contribute directly, please visit the Grassland Bird Trust website or click the donateb
The Golden-winged Warbler, another AMJV priority bird, is, like the Cerulean, a species that requires specific breeding habitat: It needs young forests or brushy wetland openings within mixed-age deciduous forests, also known as early-successional habitat. The types of disturbances that once created these gaps, like blowdowns or local wildfires, rarely happen anymore. The same is true for the Cerulean Warbler. Current research suggests that Ceruleans require structurally complex forests, which have become increasingly rare in eastern forests; they’re attracted to gaps or openings in the upper canopy, particularly in the Appalachians, a characteristic that in fact has always made them hard to study. They forage and nest higher in the canopy – and migrate between the tropics farther and earlier – than most others in their family of New World warblers.
Beginning in 2015, the AMJV received an $8 million federal grant, coupled with an additional $8 million in partner contributions, to begin managing forests for Cerulean Warblers in a dynamic way – reflecting the ever-changing nature of healthy forests. About 80 percent of the world’s Ceruleans breed within the AMJV’s territory, which covers 12 states and 103 million acres of the Appalachians. About 80 percent of this land is privately owned. Working with more than 240 private landowners who received incentives to manage their forests, AMJV staff collaborated with over 20 partner organizations to enhance forests on over 17,000 acres, creating those openings to allow sunlight to reach the forest floor. The resulting habitat suited Ceruleans, as well as other deep-forest lovers like the Wood Thrush, a beloved species with a famous song whose population decline tracks the Cerulean Warbler’s. Close to 700 acres of surface mines in Ohio and Kentucky were also restored, which will, in time, grow into the kinds of forests these birds need.
Structurally complex forests also suit the Wood Thrush, another at-risk species. Photo by Michael J. Parr.
These “dynamic forests,” as foresters and biologists describe them, hold a world of life and opportunity, as trees of different ages and species grow and change over time, and with them the birds that return to them year after year. Several years of research by AMJV partners show that dynamic forest management benefits a whole suite of species, rather than a few target birds that use the same habitat. Beyond the nesting period, research has shown that Cerulean Warblers, Golden-winged Warblers, Wood Thrush, and other songbirds preferred structurally complex forests that offered them many options. In other words, a dynamic landscape.
These findings now guide conservation strategies. In the Appalachians, there are signs of recovery for Cerulean Warblers and Wood Thrush. Data from eBird and the Breeding Bird Survey now show a slight increase in the Wood Thrush population since 2014, and a stabilization in Cerulean Warbler populations since about 2010. Though the grant from 2015 has since ended, the AMJV has secured other grants and is partnering with universities, state and federal agencies, and private companies to continue restoring habitat for migratory birds.“If you look at our history, one of our strong suits is having boots on the ground working at landscape scales, addressing issues that are affecting species in steep decline,” said Shawn Graff, vice president of ABC’s regional programs, who spoke to Bird Collective in 2020 when we first partnered with ABC to highlight its work in the northern Great Lakes for Golden-winged and Kirtland’s Warblers.
With almost 80% of Appalachian forests being privately owned, family forest owners can play a critical role in improving habitat for declining songbirds. Forest management that benefits songbirds often improves forest health and productivity as well. Photo by Liz Brewer.
“If you look at our history, one of our strong suits is having boots on the ground working at landscape scales, addressing issues that are affecting species in steep decline,” said Shawn Graff, vice president of ABC’s regional programs, who spoke to Bird Collective in 2020 when we first partnered with ABC to highlight its work in the northern Great Lakes for Golden-winged and Kirtland’s Warblers.
ABC was one of 33 leading science and conservation organizations and agencies which contributed to the 2022 U.S. State of the Birds Report, which found that over half of the nation’s bird species are declining. The Cerulean Warbler and Wood Thrush were named two of 70 “Tipping Point” species – species that require ongoing and immediate conservation. But ABC’s Todd Fearer, reflecting on their efforts in the Appalachians, has a simple takeaway: there is still hope.
“Many in the bird conservation community talk about the uniqueness of this moment in time – about how we’re at a threshold of some really big opportunities and changes,” Fearer said. “At no other point in recent history has conservation received so much attention, with many resources made available for action on the ground, with even more, hopefully, on the horizon. And if there was ever a time we needed to make this a reality, it’s now.”
Creating a gradual transition from field into forest through a forestry practice called “feathered edges” increases the amount and quality of habitat available. Feathered edges provide shelter for several species, including the Golden-winged Warbler, Wild Turkey, Ruffed Grouse, and many mammals. Photo by Liz Brewer.
Few migratory birds in the Western Hemisphere have been squeezed at both ends of their range as much as the Cerulean Warbler.
These sprites of the high canopy – the adult males are sky blue, hence the name, and the females are a bluish green – breed mostly in the heart of the Appalachians, one of the world’s oldest mountain ranges. From northern Alabama to New Brunswick, Canada, it stretches more than two thousand miles. It’s an ancient range with a history stretching back nearly 500 million years. Ceruleans need mature forests dominated by white oaks, sugar maple, poplar, and hickory, with tall trees and large openings or gaps in the canopy. But those forest openings rarely happen naturally anymore, and it is fair to say that, given the drastic decline in their population, Ceruleans can’t afford to wait. To the eye, Appalachian forests appear healthy, with large trees that carpet the ridges. But these forests aren’t as healthy as they look. As a result of aggressive logging in the early 20th century, and little sustainable forest management since, their trees are largely the same size and same age. The result is very little structural diversity, an understory or mid-story starved of sunlight by an oak-dominated canopy or eaten away by legions of white-tailed deer. Mountaintop removal mining, a devastating form of surface mining that removes the tops of mountains to access seams of coal within, has further reduced the Cerulean’s breeding habitat.
The addition of canopy gaps in this Pennsylvania forest has allowed sunlight to reach the forest floor and new plants to grow, slowly creating the structural diversity that the Cerulean Warbler thrives in. Photo by Liz Brewer.
They’re also long-distance migrants, crossing the Gulf of Mexico in spring and fall between their breeding and wintering grounds. Their winter home is located within a narrow band of the temperate eastern foothills of the Andes, from Venezuela south to Bolivia, where lush forests have, in recent decades, been leveled to make room for pastures and farms, of which many grow coffee or coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine. Ceruleans were once among the most abundant breeding warblers in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, but, add up the habitat changes and other threats they face, and the tragic picture is of the fastest-declining warbler species in the Western Hemisphere. The species has lost two percent of its population annually, culminating in an 80 percent drop since the mid-1960s, according to Breeding Bird Survey data.
But the Appalachian Mountains Joint Venture (AMJV), administered by American Bird Conservancy (ABC), is familiar with long odds, and in those Appalachian forests, AMJV staff are working with biologists and foresters on the ground to help turn around the decline. Their work emphasizes creating alliances, working with private landowners, and managing the landscape in a way that mimics the natural habitat that once enabled the Cerulean Warbler – and other at-risk or threatened migratory birds – to be more numerous. The AMJV, one of 21 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Joint Ventures in the U.S., is a regional partnership of over 55 state and federal agencies, conservation organizations, and universities.
Since ABC’s founding in 1994, its mission has been to conserve wild birds and their habitats throughout the Americas, from the breeding and nonbreeding grounds to the migratory stopover sites that connect them. ABC has been at the forefront of Cerulean Warbler conservation for over two decades, from the first Cerulean Warbler Technical Group (CWTG) in 2001, which sought to address the urgent management of the species’ breeding and wintering habitats, to several studies and summits that followed in West Virginia, Ecuador, and Colombia. ABC’s Todd Fearer, the coordinator of the AMJV, now chairs this group.
Kirtland's Warbler. Photo by Joel Trick, USFWS.
The Golden-winged Warbler requires specific breeding habitat: It needs young forests or brushy wetland openings within mixed-age deciduous forests, also known as early-successional forest. Photo by Michael J. Parr.
The Golden-winged Warbler, another AMJV priority bird, is, like the Cerulean, a species that requires specific breeding habitat: It needs young forests or brushy wetland openings within mixed-age deciduous forests, also known as early-successional habitat. The types of disturbances that once created these gaps, like blowdowns or local wildfires, rarely happen anymore. The same is true for the Cerulean Warbler. Current research suggests that Ceruleans require structurally complex forests, which have become increasingly rare in eastern forests; they’re attracted to gaps or openings in the upper canopy, particularly in the Appalachians, a characteristic that in fact has always made them hard to study. They forage and nest higher in the canopy – and migrate between the tropics farther and earlier – than most others in their family of New World warblers.
Around five acres of this West Virginia forest was transitioned to young forest to create habitat for the Golden-winged Warbler. This photo was taken the first spring after the cut took place. Already tulip-poplar, locust, oaks, and a multitude of shrubs and herbaceous plants that were once dormant in the seed bank now can grow. Photo by Liz Brewer.
Beginning in 2015, the AMJV received an $8 million federal grant, coupled with an additional $8 million in partner contributions, to begin managing forests for Cerulean Warblers in a dynamic way – reflecting the ever-changing nature of healthy forests. About 80 percent of the world’s Ceruleans breed within the AMJV’s territory, which covers 12 states and 103 million acres of the Appalachians. About 80 percent of this land is privately owned. Working with more than 240 private landowners who received incentives to manage their forests, AMJV staff collaborated with over 20 partner organizations to enhance forests on over 17,000 acres, creating those openings to allow sunlight to reach the forest floor. The resulting habitat suited Ceruleans, as well as other deep-forest lovers like the Wood Thrush, a beloved species with a famous song whose population decline tracks the Cerulean Warbler’s. Close to 700 acres of surface mines in Ohio and Kentucky were also restored, which will, in time, grow into the kinds of forests these birds need.
Structurally complex forests also suit the Wood Thrush, another at-risk species. Photo by Michael J. Parr.
These “dynamic forests,” as foresters and biologists describe them, hold a world of life and opportunity, as trees of different ages and species grow and change over time, and with them the birds that return to them year after year. Several years of research by AMJV partners show that dynamic forest management benefits a whole suite of species, rather than a few target birds that use the same habitat. Beyond the nesting period, research has shown that Cerulean Warblers, Golden-winged Warblers, Wood Thrush, and other songbirds preferred structurally complex forests that offered them many options. In other words, a dynamic landscape.
These findings now guide conservation strategies. In the Appalachians, there are signs of recovery for Cerulean Warblers and Wood Thrush. Data from eBird and the Breeding Bird Survey now show a slight increase in the Wood Thrush population since 2014, and a stabilization in Cerulean Warbler populations since about 2010. Though the grant from 2015 has since ended, the AMJV has secured other grants and is partnering with universities, state and federal agencies, and private companies to continue restoring habitat for migratory birds.
With almost 80% of Appalachian forests being privately owned, family forest owners can play a critical role in improving habitat for declining songbirds. Forest management that benefits songbirds often improves forest health and productivity as well. Photo by Liz Brewer.
“If you look at our history, one of our strong suits is having boots on the ground working at landscape scales, addressing issues that are affecting species in steep decline,” said Shawn Graff, vice president of ABC’s regional programs, who spoke to Bird Collective in 2020 when we first partnered with ABC to highlight its work in the northern Great Lakes for Golden-winged and Kirtland’s Warblers.
ABC was one of 33 leading science and conservation organizations and agencies which contributed to the 2022 U.S. State of the Birds Report, which found that over half of the nation’s bird species are declining. The Cerulean Warbler and Wood Thrush were named two of 70 “Tipping Point” species – species that require ongoing and immediate conservation. But ABC’s Todd Fearer, reflecting on their efforts in the Appalachians, has a simple takeaway: there is still hope.
“Many in the bird conservation community talk about the uniqueness of this moment in time – about how we’re at a threshold of some really big opportunities and changes,” Fearer said. “At no other point in recent history has conservation received so much attention, with many resources made available for action on the ground, with even more, hopefully, on the horizon. And if there was ever a time we needed to make this a reality, it’s now.”
Creating a gradual transition from field into forest through a forestry practice called “feathered edges” increases the amount and quality of habitat available. Feathered edges provide shelter for several species, including the Golden-winged Warbler, Wild Turkey, Ruffed Grouse, and many mammals. Photo by Liz Brewer.
To learn more about American Bird Conservancy, as well as to contribute directly, please visit its website or click the DONATE button below.
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