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What is the WatchList?
The Alaska WatchList identifies Alaskan birds that need help. Birds on the WatchList are species or subspecies faced with a combination of population decline, small population size, limited geographic range, or threats, such as oil spills or habitat loss on their breeding and wintering grounds or along migration routes. The WatchList includes subspecies because Alaska has unique responsibility for stewardship of these important regional populations.

The WatchList is designed to act as an early warning system that focuses attention on at-risk populations before they are in jeopardy of extinction. The time to save a species is while it is still common. Saving species already pushed to the brink of extinction is difficult, costly, and controversial. A far more effective approach is to work cooperatively with resource managers, landowners, industry, conservationists, and others to study, monitor, manage, and protect bird populations and their habitats before crises arise. Hence, the aim of the WatchList is to shift the conservation agenda from reactive, last-minute rescue attempts to preventative action. Working together and proactively, we can keep common birds common.

For completeness, however, the WatchList also includes species listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. In Alaska, those species are the Short-tailed Albatross, which is listed as endangered, the Spectacled Eider and Steller's Eider, both of which are listed as threatened, and the Kittlitz’s Murrelet, which is listed as a candidate for protection.

How Was the WatchList Developed?
The Alaska WatchList was compiled by Audubon Alaska in cooperation with Boreal Partners in Flight, which is a coalition of state, federal, and private-sector biologists, resource managers and conservationists working together to assess the status of and protect birds in Alaska.

Nationally, Partners in Flight developed a standard approach for identifying bird species that are priorities for conservation. With some adaptations, this same approach was used in developing the Alaska WatchList. The basic concept involves a matrix reflecting degrees of concern with respect to such factors as population trend, relative abundance, breeding distribution, distribution outside the breeding season, and the importance of Alaska in a species' or subspecies' range. This last factor excludes species for which their occurrence in Alaska is only of marginal importance. Species or subspecies cited on the WatchList are ones that have high degrees of concern for combinations of these factors. Data on bird populations in Alaska are often limited, especially for land birds. The WatchList relies on the best existing information, supplemented by expert opinion. The WatchList will be revised periodically as new research and monitoring data become available.

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