Tweeters,

Lets call it the Audubon-Tweeters Washington State 2008 Spring
Migration Roosting Vaux's Swift Census.

Here's what's up.

Project description

The need

The Vaux?s Swift nests only in Western North America in areas of
habitat that have been continually under siege from timber interests
and developers. It takes little imagination to consider these birds a
migrating indicator species for the Pacific Northwest forests, sort of
a neo-tropic Spotted Owl.

Yet this is a poorly understood and little studied creature. The fear
is that Vaux?s Swift could be in serious decline, but there are few
numbers from which to draw conclusions. Here is an Audubon-Tweeters
opportunity to lead a valuable, coordinated, large-scale citizen
science project.

Scope

?Common knowledge? has been that the communal roosting for migrating
Vaux?s Swifts is a fall phenomenon, but is this really the case? Why
wouldn?t they also do this when migrating northward? A number of our
locations were documented in the spring and the Wagoner Elementary
School is known to host the birds twice a year. Numbers should be
smaller in the spring. Let?s find out.

Audubon has a list of 33 known historical migration sites in the state.
How many of these are still in use? In a few cases, do they even
still exist? Lets find out.

There must be addition sites. The prime real estate for these
migrating birds is huge brick chimneys. These are easy for both bird
and man to locate. If the monster chimneys in the state are documented
and staked out, might we discover sites that are a greater spectacle
than Wagoner? Lets find out.

The more observers involved, the more comprehensive and valuable the
project will be. Too many observers are not a concern. Can we get
hundreds involved? Let?s find out.

If enough observers could be found, each location should be watched
every night from when they are first observed until the last bird has
moved on. For starters, let?s consider the last week of April through
the first week of May.

The spring migration census will be good practice for the fall. 2008
could/should be the first year of an ongoing twice-yearly event.

Think big. The project could come to involve California, Oregon and
Canada.


Yesterday A single Vaux's Swift was seen over Eugene.

Larry Schwitters your Audubon-Tweeters connection
Issaquah
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 2531 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20080410/769e28fa/attachment.bin