Guided By Birds: Avian data to guide Clayton Hill restoration

While these data are interesting on their own, the most useful data for evaluating restoration will come from our ability to identify trends over time. These first two years of data are only the baseline numbers that we can use for future comparisons. In the coming years our dataset will grow alongside our restoration plants, and as it does we hope to discover new insights about the changing quality of the Clayton Hill habitat. In the meantime, patience is a requirement. Meaningful restoration occurs on the timescale of years to decades, as it takes plants that long to become established and even longer for them to serve their full suite of ecosystem services. As the native species that we’ve added to Clayton Hill grow, we hope they will provide food and improve habitat for a wide range of bird species. But if we grow it, will they come? Although birds have been observed to show remarkable memory for quality habitat along their migration routes (Mettke-Hofmann and Gwinner. 2003), they first have to discover a site worth remembering. For this reason, it’s important that we’re always looking for opportunities to scale up our restoration efforts and improve connectivity between forest sites.

Already, partners who’ve been working on the Clayton Hill restoration project are using initial observations of avian habitat quality to inform our next management steps. An invasive annual grass called Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum) has been steadily expanding through much of Clayton North and Clayton East, and an alarm has been raised that this grass is causing trouble for ground-dwelling migratory songbirds. Given this reality, we are focusing on the habitat needs of those species when designing future projects and workplans – for instance planting shrubs and perennials that will stand up (literally) against the crushing weight of a field of bolting stiltgrass (below).