When a Western Tanager
is looking for just the right spot to build a nest and raise its young, it’s looking for a little bit of everything: dense cover to hide in, clearings that allow sunlight to reach the forest floor to help different shrubs and forbs grow, and perhaps the edge of a grassy meadow. In short, this species—and many others like it—benefits from a mosaicked forest landscape. In the past, wildfire and cultural burning practices helped forests across the West maintain diverse ages and structures, providing this mosaic for birds and other wildlife.
But forested landscapes in much of the West are increasingly threatened by destructive wildfire and are decreasing in bird and wildlife abundance. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, fires were suppressed and commercial timber harvest peaked and slowed. The result: decreased forest diversity and poorer habitat conditions for birds like the tanager that rely on mixed conditions.
Active forest management is one avenue that forest managers are taking to improve the quality of forest habitat in the Intermountain West. This includes a suite of practices that includes prescribed fire, forest thinning, and even commercial timber harvest. Gone are the days of clear-cut logging: today’s foresters use new technology and improved knowledge of forest ecology to selectively cut trees to achieve habitat goals.
Mike Lynch, with the Forest Steward’s Guild, has worked on active forest management programs targeting bird habitat all over the country. He said these programs may differ from place to place, but one theme is the same: human disturbance through strategic management actions is widely beneficial for birds and wildlife.
“In working on these forestry for birds type programs across the country, we’ve noticed that there are key habitat features that keep popping up as being important for birds in all different forested ecosystems,” he said. “How it looks in each one can vary a little bit, but all of them can be enhanced through active management.”
This is especially true in the dry-fire forests of the Intermountain West. Herb Grover of the Weminuche Audubon Society has led a citizen science project looking at bird communities in dry, mixed-conifer forests of southwestern Colorado. He said that the study, which has lasted the better part of a decade, has opened his eyes to the boost in heterogeneity—or diverse forest structure, which the study has determined that many species of birds benefit from—that occurs when a suite of active forest management tools is applied to a landscape.
“Canopy structure affects the feeding strategies of the birds that make up the bird community,” he said.
Grover said that the group’s long-term dataset reveals that fewer bird species are present in those areas with the most dense tree canopy. Many forest bird species rely on a diverse understory layer of shrubs and forbs to provide habitat for the insects they feed upon. Opening up the canopy through the use of prescribed fire or other management practices, like thinning or timber harvest, can help promote a healthy understory layer, along with the insects that are a critical food source for birds, especially during their breeding season.
“Obviously if you come in and masticate a site or log a site, it looks like it’s been destroyed,” Grover said. “It hasn’t been. It recovers within a year or two and a lot of bird species will leave for that period of time, but they come back and that’s what our datasets are showing.”
There are other benefits of timber harvest too, Grover said.
“If we don’t go out and log, the likelihood of wildfires being more destructive increases tremendously,” he said. “We have members [of our Audubon chapter] who would shudder to hear me say I favor logging, but I definitely favor logging over wildfire and many of our members are coming to see that.”
Using a suite of tools from logging to prescribed fire to actively manage forests is a great way to maximize forest health and resilience. Keith Bruno, the Southwest Colorado Community Naturalist with Audubon Rockies who has partnered with Grover on the citizen science project, said that this is more and more important as forests across the West are threatened by climate change.
“With the presence of drought, you have to be adaptive and dynamic,” he said. “We’re heading toward more vulnerability to insects and disease. Birds are an indicator of environmental health, so you’ve got to be paying attention to the birds. Forest managers are seeing that and recognizing that we’re providing key information that can help them make decisions.”
Both Grover and Bruno agree that the timber harvest/active management can’t just happen for the sake of cutting trees—it has to be strategic. Grover pointed to activities like leaving a few standing dead snags in an area as an incredibly important things that forest managers can do, mainly because of the role they play in nesting for multiple species.
“These bird species are coming to our forests to feed and to reproduce,” he said. “Whatever we do to affect their reproductive success has a huge impact on the stability of their populations.”
The citizen science project has highlighted the importance of carefully planned management activities like that. But the most important part of it according to Bruno, is the way that it has brought the birding community and foresters closer together.
“There’s just this softening of the edge between forest managers and birders.” he said. “All of a sudden we’re sitting at the table at these same meetings and there’s more buy-in and more sincere interest [in what the other group has to say].
And if people can come together over cutting trees, they might just be able to come together over anything.
Learn more about how active forest management can benefit birds and other wildlife
