Bird Research

The Prothonotary Warbler is an umbrella species of the Bottomland Hardwood Forests and Swamps of the Eastern United States. This ray of sunshine that flits between Bald Cypress knees and clumps of Spanish Moss is in decline. As one of the only cavity nesting warblers, it relies on natural or woodpecker made cavities in old mature trees to nest. With habitat loss and climate change the echoing sweet sweet sweet call of the this bird is disappearing. Beidler Forest's ancient trees in the Four Holes Swamp are a strong hold for this species. Using this abundance our researchers work to understand their nesting cycles, migration timing, migration routes, wintering grounds, and conservation threats through monitoring, banding, and tracking. 

Swainson's Warblers are very secretive warblers that live in thick dense forest understories. Their habitat of choice is often difficult for people to get too, as their preferred homes may require a machete to navigate, and their closest neighbors are venomous snakes, mosquitoes, and ornery feral hogs. This earns them the nickname "ghost bird" by many birders, as they're difficult to find for their lists. Swainson's Warblers eluded birders and scientists, with little being known about their migration routes, timing, and wintering locations. Though a collaborative effort across their breeding range, we partnered with other orgs to track them using a brand new piloted technology, barometric light level geolocators. You can read more about these in our blog post about the project. If you're a land owner and want to bring these birds to your property, we have proven Bird-friendly Forestry techniques that replicate their ideal habitat. 

Painted Buntings, with the nickname nonpareil, which is a French term that roughly means without equal, is a great descriptor of this flying rainbow that skulks around the hummock islands and forest edges of South Carolina. This bird captures the love and admiration of birders and non birders alike. Facing population declines from habitat loss, the coastal squeeze (which is development from the land side and sea level rise from the other), and illegal pet trades, this bird is in the hearts and minds of conservationists. At Audubon we've worked with homeowners who host buntings at their feeders to tag and track this species to determine their migratory movements, wintering and stop over locations. In the process we recaptured the oldest known Painted Bunting ever to be documented. Read about Old Man Bunting here. 

Baltimore Orioles have developed a funny habitat of overwintering in South Carolina. The majority of this species travels to Central and South America to overwinter, but a portion of the population has decided to frequent the backyards of South Carolinians. To understand why they do this, where these birds are spending the rest of the year, and their migration behavior, SCDNR, Furman University, and Audubon teamed up to take a decades long SCDNR Baltimore Oriole banding project to the next level by using radio transmitters and the Motus Wildlife Tracking System to reveal their secrets. This project has moved from the field tagging phase and is now in data processing chapter. We hope to have some interesting results to share soon! 

Purple Martins are like the domestic dog of the bird world, in the Eastern portion of their range, they cannot exist without humans. Purple Martins have made a full behavioral shift to nesting in only human made structures. That seems a little odd, but it dates back to the first inhabitants of the land and their close symbiotic relationship with North America's Indigenous tribes. Purple Martins would occupy hollowed out gourds on poles offered by indigenous communities and in turn acted like a garden pest security system. When intruding animals came in to snack on the crops in the gardens and fields of villages the Purple Martins would alert them. In turn, the martins gained some nice custom housing, and the added protection from predators. Since this range wide behavioral shift, we are now the only source of housing for Purple Martins. Audubon SC holds landlord workshops to train new landlords on how to set up and properly manage Purple Martin colonies, and how to collect and report data on nesting to the Purple Martin Conservation Association. 

The Motus Wildlife Tracking system is one giant group science project. It consists of radio receiving towers across the hemisphere in an ever expanding network that detect radio tags deployed on birds, insects, and bats. Audubon South Carolina has contributed to a statewide network of towers with partners from the Upstate to the Coast. These towers are being added and upgraded all the time, and we are working to deploy nanotags on study species, like Swainson's Warblers and Baltimore Orioles. Our network of towers has had 574 detections and counting! 

Interested in installing a tower? Reach out! 

MAPS stands for Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship. This continent wide collaboration of banding stations keeps a finger on the pulse of breeding bird populations. Following standardized protocols across each station, the data collected can be used to estimate survival, recruitment, productivity, range shifts, disease, and more! We host a MAPS station at Beidler Forest that anyone can visit when it is operating, allowing us to share the process and science up close.