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The following highlights describe a few of the objectives for the Grassland Bird Program in 2008, and also describes some of the progress made during the year.

Objective #1. Protection and proper management of approximately 1,100 acres of private-land grassland bird habitat in critical focus areas of New York State through the Landowner Incentive Program, as well many acres more through the actions of our several partners, also within those focus areas.

Conservation planning for grassland birds in New York identified the cooperation with private landowners as critical to the success of the conservation effort. New York’s Landowner Incentive Program (LIP) was created in response to this need. Over 200 applications (for over 6,000 acres of habitat) were received during the LIP initial application period. After a thorough review and ranking process designed to target critical grassland bird habitat, 14 applications were accepted and contracts with the landowners were approved in the spring of 2008 (totaling 1,300 acres). Audubon New York created the Site Management Plans for each property following the prescription included in the habitat management section of the “Conservation Plan for Grassland Birds in New York” (released in June 2008). Following a review of the initial application period, a refined application period for the remaining LIP funding is expected to occur during the winter of 2008/2009.

A joint application by NYSDEC and Audubon New York for funding through the State Acres For wildlife-Conservation Reserve Program was approved by the USDA, and funding for 4900 acres was approved. The sign-up for this program began during the summer of 2008, and will continue until all the acres have been allocated. The basic template for the Site Conservation Plans was modeled after the Landowner Incentive Program, and the eligibility criteria that the land must be active farmland is a critical part in the effort to reverse the widespread loss of suitable breeding habitat to intensive agricultural practices.

Objective #2. Management of public lands, e.g., State Wildlife Management Areas and State Parks, for grassland birds where appropriate.

The inclusion of public land managers in the conservation planning process has proved invaluable as an educational and consensus building tool. By participating directly in the collection of pertinent data, the land managers were poised to incorporate the principles of the Conservation Plan in their site-specific plans and habitat management activities. For example, habitat managers at the Montezuma Wetlands Complex have planted experimental mixes of native-cool season grasses developed by the grasslands partnership to assess the feasibility of their long-term management along with their effectiveness in providing the habitat structure needed by grassland breeding birds. In addition, the Conservation Plan has already served as an invaluable reference for planning by county parks, wildlife refuges, NYS parks, and NYS wildlife management areas, to name a few. In addition, the habitat management elements of the plan have been used for grassland conservation efforts beyond New York in Pennsylvania and Ontario, CA.

Objective #3. Creation of a detailed monitoring protocol targeting grassland birds in their habitats across the Northeast and study, in New York, of the effectiveness of management prescriptions administered through several existing conservation programs. Because Audubon is actively involved with the administrators of these conservation programs as part of the New York grassland bird conservation partnership, the results will feed back to these programs directly so as to improve their effectiveness in the future.

Audubon’s leadership in coordinating the conservation planning process for grassland birds in New York led to Mike Morgan being asked to chair the grassland working group of the NE Coordinated Bird Monitoring Partnership. This collaboration has led to a pilot season in 2008 to test various protocols (including distance sampling, time of detection, detection histories, and combined techniques) while collecting data which can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the private and public land conservation programs that are targeting grassland breeding birds.

Approximately 540 points were sampled (twice) during the field season, and majority of the points were located in New Jersey (2008 was the 3rd year of New Jersey’s long-term monitoring project). Analysis of the 2008 data is underway, with the objective of refining the protocol for implementation in 2009. In addition, the data collected are being used to evaluate the effectiveness of Landowner Incentive Programs at protecting critical habitat patches for grassland birds, and will serve to compare abundances and densities of targeted birds on conservation grasslands with those on unprotected habitats.

A series of reports regarding this monitoring effort were produced in December of 2008, and describe in some detail the current status of the monitoring projects and the framework for moving forward. The work described in each of these three reports is one component of a multipart trial to coordinate and implement a robust monitoring program for grassland breeding birds across the Northeast. Three separate grants funded through the American Bird Conservancy are supporting this program, and as the grants were awarded at various stages of the program’s development, the deliverables and reports vary slightly in scope and objectives. The three complementary reports include Tsipoura et al. (2008), Morgan and Burger (2008a), and Burger et al. (2008). The problem statements and backgrounds for these separate reports are nearly identical, along with some descriptions of protocols and standard operating procedures, in an effort to allow each report to stand alone if necessary. To differentiate between the three reports, an overly simplistic comparison of the key messages of the three reports is:

1. Burger et al. (2008; “Developing a Regional Monitoring Framework Applicable to Patchily Distributed Bird Species in Grassland, Scrub-shrub, and Forest Habitats”) – Concepts for (and the 2008 trial effort) incorporating a spatially explicit sampling framework into the grassland monitoring program in partnership with a similar monitoring program for Golden-winged Warblers.
2. Morgan and Burger (2008; “Monitoring the Effectiveness of Grassland Bird Conservation”) – Efforts and perspectives from New York on developing a grassland bird monitoring program.
3. Tsipoura et al. (2008; “Development of avian indicators and measures for monitoring threats and effectiveness of conservation actions – Grassland Birds”) – Guidelines to direct future collaboration on an expanded monitoring program for grassland birds in the Northeast.