GoMAMN Strategic Bird Monitoring Guidelines: Landbirds

Landbirds in the Gulf of Mexico region include an ecologically diverse group of taxa that depend on a wide range of terrestrial habitats and the airspace above them. For the GoMAMN region of the Gulf of Mexico, the Landbird Working Group identified 19 species from 12 families as priorities for monitoring (Table 3.1). In addition, all species that stopover within the GoMAMN region during migration (i.e., passage migrants) are of concern, as are the habitats they use. The 19 priority species use a wide range of habitat types and include species that spend some (e.g., breeding, wintering, migration seasons) or all (e.g., residents) of their annual cycle in the GoMAMN region. The GoMAMN Landbird Working Group organized the priority landbirds into five groups based on a combination of habitat and season—forest breeding, forest wintering, grassland breeding, grassland wintering, and passage migrants—realizing that there would be overlap of habitats and seasons for some species. For example, Swainson's Warbler (Limnothlypis swainsonii) breeds in and migrates through forested habitat in the Gulf of Mexico region and Northern Bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) uses both prairie grasslands and evergreen forest (i.e., open pine savannas) (Table 3.1). For some species, such as Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris) and Common Ground-Dove (Columbina passerina), which often use scrub/shrub vegetation, the habitat-based designations above may be overly simplistic. Although it occurs along higher, drier fringes of palustrine and estuarine emergent marsh habitat, Sedge Wren (Cistothorus platensis) is included here as a landbird (rather than a marsh bird) because it is most commonly found during the winter along the Gulf coast in upland evergreen forest (i.e., wet pine savanna) habitat and grassland habitats. Selection of the five groups was predicated on the assumption that management efforts would be similar for species using these habitats in a given season, and that monitoring methods would be habitat and season specific.