Audubon program explores longspur habitat

"Fatal Attraction for an Imperiled Songbird: Is Cropland in the northern Great Plains an Ecological Trap for the Thick-billed longspur?” is Mission Mountain Audubon's community program at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 29, in the Polson Library Meeting Room.

Grassland birds as a group have declined precipitously over the past few decades, as agricultural expansion and intensification have altered more and more of the prairie landscape. Birds that remain exist within scattered patches of native prairie, but others seem to have some tolerance for human-altered landscapes.

Amber Swicegood, a wildlife biologist for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, will discuss the Thick-billed longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii) a species that can be found nesting in wheat, pea and lentil fields across Montana during the breeding season.

Swicegood did her graduate work at Montana State University in Dr. Lance McNew’s Wildlife Habitat Ecology Lab. For her graduate research, she set out to study the longspur, assuming that a bird nesting on disturbed ground under constant threat of plowing, spraying, harvesting, and drought surely does not stand much chance at a successful nesting season

The expansive bare ground in crop fields appears to attract longspurs early in the season, but as vegetation grows, habitat quality changes rapidly as microclimate conditions at the ground level shift and birds lose the line-of-sight advantage for seeing and avoiding predators while on the nest.

During a two-year study, Swicegood and her colleagues found 240 Thick-billed longspur nests and compared success rates between crop sites and native grassland habitat. She also assessed how longspurs responded to the changing vegetation structure in crop fields as the growing season progressed.

In her presentation, she will discuss what they discovered about longspurs nesting in crop fields and directions for future research.

Everyone is welcome to the free presentation.