[TN-Bird] more on those cumberland county henslow's sparrows; and some bbs ruminations

With Joseph Mast and Ed LeGrand, I visited another large field on the
Campbell Farm near Mayland in Cumberland County last Saturday (July 15);
we were able to find 9 more Henslow's (7 singers and 2 nonsingers,
including one bird with food for young) during a few hours of "field"
work that morning.  Joseph covered still another field not previously
explored during the late afternoon on Saturday and was able to detect 16
more Henslows's (13 singers and 3 nonsingers, including another bird
with food for young).  So the overall total for the past two Saturdays'
efforts is 97 (76 singers and 21 nonsingers, of which 3 were juveniles
and 2 were adults with food for young).  Believe it or not, there are
still some fields that we have not gotten to yet, so the overall total
is almost certain to exceed 100--and the number of singers may approach
that number; stay tuned.
 
Unless it happened this summer, Henslow's Sparrow has never been
registered on any of the Breeding Bird Survey routes run in Tennessee
since 1966, amounting to nearly 40 routes per year for 41 years.  Nor
was this unaccomplished singer detected during a lot of Breeding Bird
Atlas work back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Yet during the past
dozen years a moderate-sized breeding population has been determined to
occur in the state with at least three locations having populations
close to or in excess of 100 birds and another dozen or so sites hosting
small numbers.  Were it not for the fact that the birding community in
TN is having trouble getting 47 BBS routes run each year, I would say
that we need to add a few more BBS routes to the current total in the
hope of finding additional pockets of this rare species and probably
some others out there.  Establishing point counts at known Henslow's
sites will not tell us where the unknown populations are, or I would
encourage more folks to take that approach to finding this species.  I'm
not sure that there is a practical methodology for detecting more
Henslow's; perhaps we find them mainly as a matter of luck while
pursuing other objectives; at least that has been my case the last few
years.
 
Steve Stedman
Cookeville, TN
 
Note: I've been aquandering (a Paul Crawford term; miss him) about the
TN BBS situation for a long time now. I've placed some data relevant to
it at this page of my website; have a gander if you're BBS prone:
 
http://iweb.tntech.edu/sstedman/BBSInfoTN1966-2005.htm
 
 
 
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