On a muggy prairie just southwest of Asheboro, Gabriela Garrison and her 12-year-old daughter Eleana huddle around a young cardinal. Eleana holds the bird loosely in place with a ‘bander’s grip.’ The bird’s head pokes out from between her pointer and middle finger, while the rest of her hand closes gently over the feathered torso. From this comfortable position, the duo affix an ID band to the cardinal’s outstretched leg. In addition to banding, the Garrisons note the age, sex, fat storage, and weight of the cardinal in a logbook.
This cardinal is a particularly plucky bird, and squawks throughout the process.
“Cardinals are so angry!” Eleana exclaims.
“No,” Gabriela counters. “They’re feisty.”
This upland prairie is the site of an active experiment. Every summer, scientists like Gabriela, who is the eastern Piedmont habitat conservation coordinator for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, journey to this same meadow to band birds as part of an ongoing initiative to learn more about the animals and the prairie they dwell on. The land was formerly a cow pasture but has since been converted to native grasslands, leading researchers to ask how these changes would affect bird populations.
John Gerwin is an ornithologist and research curator at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. He has led this study since the fall of 2015 and sees this land restoration as an ecological success story.
“If you build it, do they come?” Gerwin asks. “Well, they built it. And yes, the birds are here along with all these other pollinators and these other things that we document while we’re here, but it definitely has attracted a lot of different species.”
Banding has also enabled the scientists to chart birds’ migratory patterns, breeding behaviors, and health over the years near the Uwharrie National Forest, an area that previously did not have an active banding site.
From cow pasture to bird sanctuary
The bird banding takes place on a parcel of privately owned land that is tucked in the Uwharrie mountain range. The land used to be an overgrown cattle farm, but the new owners, with support from private land biologists, have been reintroducing native plant species acre by acre since 2006. Additionally, the property undergoes frequent controlled burns so the owners can learn what plants naturally grow back on the prairie.
With these environmental changes, the owners and local scientists wondered how land restoration affects the prairies’ species, particularly its bird populations. Initial baseline surveys of the birds began in 2005, however it wouldn’t be for a number of years before data collection was in full swing.
On a recent morning in July, 25 giant bird nets were set up throughout the banding area, resembling life-size spiderwebs strung between two sticks. Each net is placed in a slightly different habitat, to ensure that birds with different environmental preferences are logged on the roughly 50-acre sampling area. Birds will fly into the net and their weight combined with gravity, will cause them to sink into a gauzy pocket. Caught birds are freed from the net, bagged, and then brought back to the scientists’ banding station.
All of the data collected from the prairie is sent to an open-access federal repository through the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Each individual banding trip creates a rich dataset that can reveal trends over time on the bird’s behavior as well as on the land.
Gerwin from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has found that tagging and tracking birds has provided insight into the quality of the prairie.
“By tagging the birds, when we weigh them, look at their fat scores, that gives us a view of their overall health,” says Gerwin. “Which is sort of a surrogate for how this property is providing the food resource.”
Like a weathervane charting the wind’s direction, the birds’ health can indicate the overall bounty of the land. Scientists have found that with the environmental improvements, this land has brought more birds, as well as new species of birds to the prairie. Birds play an essential role in maintaining the delicate balance of the ecosystem while also serving as critical seed spreaders.
One bird species of note is the prairie warbler, a small songbird with yellow, black, and rust-colored plumage. According to national bird surveys, prairie warblers are declining in numbers. But they’re now frequenting this particular prairie in droves. The key to their success seems to stem from the land restoration. Gerwin says that prairie warblers prefer scrubby habitats on the outskirts of the forest. With the conscious planting efforts of the landowners, this meadow is now the ideal environment for this species.
Kacy Cook, a coastal waterbird biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and long-time collaborator with Gerwin, says that banding in the Uwharries is of particular importance. According to Cook, there hasn’t been a station in this forest tracking birds. Thus, the behavioral habits and health of the birds in this region have remained a statistical black box, until now.
“The information we get back, it’s very valuable, because the Uwharries is, we think, very important for migration of birds,” says Cook. “So this station shows what birds are migrating through. And also we catch a lot of certain species and we can tell their population trends somewhat from the data.”
As birds wing it south during the late summer and fall, scientists will be able to chart where the Uwharries fit into the birds’ migratory journey.
A scientific homecoming
In the seven years that Gerwin has led the project, he has formed a network of scientists that return annually to help band in the summertime. While banding at this location occurs monthly, this special summertime trip brings friends and colleagues from different institutions together for a research reunion. Scientists at this year’s session represented the North Carolina Zoo, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ayuda Companies, and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.
Some banders joined Gerwin’s team young. Amber Swicegood, a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one such biologist who has banded with Gerwin on a number of projects.
“I was 13 or 14. So I was a high schooler that needed something to do, wanted something to do outdoors with animals,” says Swicegood. “It was a lot of fun. It’s a good experience for young people to be exposed to this kind of stuff.”
For the Garrison family, bird banding is multigenerational. Gabriela first met Gerwin when she was a member of the Junior Curators Program at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Years later, Gabriela now brings her daughter Eleana to the Uwharrie prairie. Eleana has been visiting this prairie for a while, but only started banding last year.
“I love it,” says Eleana. “It’s really different. …Nobody else, like in my school or class, gets to come to the mountains to band birds.”
