David Lee believes managing southern Appalachian forests for birds would be a simple endeavor if managers would adhere to three basic principles: “big is good, more is better and more big old growth is better still.”

Lee, who has been Curator of Birds at the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences for 25 years, was one of the speakers Saturday, Sept. 9, at a forests conference held at Owens Conference Center on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

The conference was hosted by the Western North Carolina Alliance. It was titled “Mimicking Nature or Manipulating Forests” and was designed to discuss natural and human disturbances in the southern Appalachian forests.

Lee’s presentation was titled “Bird Diversity in the Southern Appalachians: Managing Myths and Misconceptions.” Lee has spent years studying broad scale distribution patterns of breeding birds in various ecosystems throughout the region.

He said a monitoring program over 10 square miles at Grandfather Mountain recorded 100 species of breeding birds, half the population of breeding birds in North Carolina.

Lee said the state has lost only 3 to 6 percent of its original indigenous species while 15 percent of its breeding population didn’t occur here 100 years ago and 50 percent of the state’s population have doubled their distribution.

Lee cautioned that the increase in species and distribution was not necessarily a good thing because the birds benefiting are generally aggressive and often exotic species like starlings, house sparrows, crows and brown-headed cowbirds, birds that seem to thrive in human landscapes like farms, suburbs, golf courses and strip malls.

Besides abundant terrestrial habitat, old growth provides needed vertical habitat as well. “They’re like high rise apartments,” Lee said.

Different birds find niches in old growth, from the ground (ruffed grouse, turkey, oven birds) to low shrubs (hooded warbler, chestnut-sided warbler, Canada warbler) to mid-canopy (black-throated blue warbler, rose-breasted grosbeak, blue-headed vireo) to tree tops (flycatchers, blackburnian warblers, scarlet tanager.)

Lee said concern over brushy or early successional habitat for birds like golden-winged warblers is grossly overstated. According to Lee, blow-downs and canopy gaps in old growth provide this type of habitat, and when you add that to powerlines, roads and forest edges, there is adequate habitat for these species.

The Southern Environmental Law Center is suing the U.S. Forest Service over lack of protection for cerulean warblers. Lee said there is no data that suggests ceruleans were ever common in the southern Appalachians. “That’s simply the way it is with birds, some are more common than others,” he said.
Of course, adherence to the three principles stated earlier would preserve cerulean habitat.

It is easier for birders to see birds along forest edges or in other open habitat, but this doesn’t mean those same birds aren’t found in interior forest habitats. Lee has also done monitoring in the old growth Joyce Kilmer National Forest.

“Seventy percent of the birds recorded in Joyce Kilmer were wood warblers. We found 20 of the 27 species of wood warblers that nest in the state,” Lee said.

According to Lee, the birds that need help in North Carolina are the indigenous interior forest species that are suffering from loss of habitat. Some of the species he mentioned were northern saw-whet owls, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, black-capped chickadees and red crossbills.

“Birds are easy to manage for. Just remember big is good, more is better and more big old growth is better still,” Lee said.

 

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The Smoky Mountain News