THANK YOU!
We have now completed two years of our donor-supported Adopt-a-Transect program. Thanks to your generosity, we have been able to conduct 15 surveys of 11 transects across the two years. We have surveyed aspen, coniferous forest, Joshua tree, pinyon-juniper, sagebrush, and salt desert habitats across Nevada. Along the way, we have learned a lot.
When we dreamed up this program in 2021, we were still in the midst of deep drought. According to the US Drought Monitor (USDM), not only was all of Nevada in some degree of drought, a full 40% of Nevada was in the USDM’s deepest/worst category of drought for months. During my lowland Mojave Desert bird surveys that year, I didn’t find confirmed breeding birds outside of riparian and urban areas (I didn’t have higher elevation surveys down there that year). I had active territorial birds early on in April, but by the time the calendar flipped over to May, that activity plummeted. Even singing became more rare. At one Mojave scrub site where I’d camped every season for over a decade, the only sign of the usually active territorial Black-throated Sparrows was a single phrase sung at 3 o’clock in the morning.
On surveys elsewhere in Nevada, overall effects were less in-your-face than they were in the Mojave Desert, though it seemed like we were finding Black-throated Sparrows, for example, in greater numbers on sites where we weren’t used to – further north or further uphill, sometimes in denser pinyon-juniper than we were used to finding them.
Being able to survey more sites in 2022, when the worst of the drought had lifted – though still with vegetation, prey, and bird populations dealing with after-effects – was incredibly useful. Some of these sites had had relatively recent surveys, like VM-McKissick – other sites hadn’t been surveyed in 10 to 20 years. These donor-supported surveys allowed us to visit 8 transects and gain insight into the conditions at those sites.
In 2023, we visited 7 adopted sites – some of which were ones we’d visited in 2022. We’d had a wet winter and, overall, a fairly cool spring. The changes were dramatic. My first survey of the season was of a Joshua tree transect on Desert National Wildlife Refuge. My datasheets were filled with comments about all the insects I was seeing in these uplands – I am not used to combining notes about mosquitoes landing on me with exclamation marks and smiley faces, but it was encouraging! The Mojave scrub and yucca habitats were filled with invertebrate prey, and the birds were responding. On the other hand, up in northern Nevada, surveying a sagebrush transect near Porter Spring, I couldn’t help but compare the bird community in front of me to that from our 2019 survey – at that time in our third year in a row of relatively low drought levels – and notice the current low numbers of birds, relative to those we’d seen then.
Every survey we’re able to conduct, all those data that we’re able to combine, compare, and put into context – they make a real difference to our understanding of the current status of the bird communities in Nevada, and to how those communities may or may not respond to changing conditions. Your donations to our Adopt a Transect program make a difference, and we are incredibly grateful for you!
- Jen
Explore the map
Below is a map of our donor-supported surveys we’ve conducted the past two years. You can explore these sites and see species lists and photos from our surveys by clicking on the pins to open a pop-up window. Sometimes there are more than one survey associated with a particular pin – if so, in the top right corner of the popup you may see little arrows with “1 of 2” for example, and by clicking on the arrow on the top left you can scroll through the surveys.
