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Ornithology Commons

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Plant Sciences

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Ornithology

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Full-Text Articles in Ornithology

Where Birds Chill: An Assessment Of The Habitat Preferences Of Birds Overwintering In Hudson Valley Forests, Elizabeth Claire Axley Jan 2019

Where Birds Chill: An Assessment Of The Habitat Preferences Of Birds Overwintering In Hudson Valley Forests, Elizabeth Claire Axley

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Many avian species overwinter in eastern North America; however, studies on bird populations are rarely undertaken during this critical survival time, and little is known as to their habitat preferences and foraging behavior. In this observational study, we performed a survey of birds overwintering in the Hudson Valley’s temperate, primarily-deciduous forests, assessing avian populations’ habitat preferences through the vegetative structural variables surrounding overwintering birds as they forage. Our results suggest that high canopy cover is critically important to predicting overwintering bird occupancy on a microhabitat scale. Moreover, overwintering birds preferentially occupy forest plots not dominated by sugar maples, in spite …


Vegetation Characteristics And Bird Communities Associated With Singing Painted Buntings In Northwest Arkansas, Lauren Kristina Thead Dec 2018

Vegetation Characteristics And Bird Communities Associated With Singing Painted Buntings In Northwest Arkansas, Lauren Kristina Thead

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

It has been shown that bird communities are affected by the species composition and physical structure of plant communities. Within avian communities, the bird species that are the most localized in distribution tend to be the most affected by habitat changes. My research analyzed plant and bird communities found with the Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris Linnaeus), a locally common but declining species throughout much of its range. First, I describe vegetation characteristics associated with singing male Painted Buntings in northwest Arkansas. I categorized field sites with singing male Painted Buntings as either managed for wildlife or unmanaged, based on land-use …