[TN-Bird] Re: a bird puzzle for the week-end birder
- From: Bill Pulliam <bb551@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: SStedman@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:08:35 -0500
> One participant in the Cumberland County Foray took me up on this
> request and suggested that an increase in the amount of suburban
> habitat
> in the county might account for the increase in NOMOs, but NOMOs
> tend to
> be pretty common in rural and urban, as well as suburban habitats,
> so an
> increase in the amount of suburban habitat (and corresponding
> reduction
> in either rural or urban habitats, or both) should not have unduly
> affected the distribution of NOMOs in the county.
Here in Lewis County, mockingbirds are mostly restricted to areas
with houses and lawns or pastures, and even then, only where this
habitat is extensive. An isolated house with a small yard amidst
woodlands and brushy habitats is not a prime place; they are only
occasional visitors at my farm even though they are abundant just a
mile up the road along the Highway 412 corridor. Mockers here are
especially concentrated in the swath of barrens from Hohenwald proper
southeast to Summertown. In much of the rest of the county they
remain pretty scarce.
So, there are large landscape-level habitat issues involved, not just
a simple urban/suburban/rural division. Can you look specifically at
the habitat changes in the priority blocks that did record mockers
this year but did not on the Atlas? Aerial photos should be
available. I'm always inclined to look hard at changes in land use/
habitat as a first explanation for bird population shifts before
invoking more esoteric or subtle explanations such as climate
change. We are at present and in recent decades changing the
landscape far more rapidly and more drastically than we are changing
the climate.
Bill Pulliam
Hohenwald TN
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