ORONO, Maine — University of Maine researchers are on a high over the results and data mined from ongoing field studies documenting migratory bird movements in the Gulf of Maine.
They had a chance to share a lot of new information and update other ornithological and wildlife groups at their second annual workshop Thursday at UMaine’s Memorial Union. The event attracted about 25 representatives from 10 groups such as the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, the National Audubon Society, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Acadia University and the New Jersey Audubon Society.
“There’s a lot of interest in this,” said UMaine doctoral student and study co-coordinator Adrienne Leppold. “The coordination of all of these techniques and monitoring one system is unprecedented. No one else in the world has pooled all this together to look at one system. And this geographic region has just been a black hole in terms of research over the years.”
The ongoing studies resulted from a desire by biologists with the Maine Coastal Islands Wildlife Refuge to establish a monitoring site in the gulf to check habitat use with an eye toward future acquisitions of land to create protected habitats.
“The initial goal hasn’t changed, but it’s become so much more,” said Leppold. “We’ve gotten much more data than we expected from these studies.”
Perhaps the most noteworthy data involved the discovery of several species of birds — such as terns, warblers and piping plovers — previously not known to frequent the gulf.
“We found the islands had more brush and scrub habitat and a greater number and diversity of birds that we didn’t expect,” said co-coordinator and UMaine ornithologist Rebecca Holbertson. “We easily, conservatively estimated over half a million birds were coming through the Penobscot Bay area alone. We had no idea of the magnitude of this.”
So far, three studies — two in the fall and one in the spring — have been conducted since late 2009. The next one is due to begin in April. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has set up banding or tagging stations on three islands: Matinic, Seal and Petit Manan.
Leppold, who has been tagging birds for almost 10 years, has been a one-woman banding machine.
“She banded more birds with less effort than anyone else in the Gulf of Maine region,” said Holbertson. “She just blew everything else out of the water. We got more than 10,000 birds banded in all in 60 days last year.”
The researchers hope this gold mine of data will help better evaluate ideal sites for possible wind turbines on and offshore as well as other public and private projects.
“We want to have the data to make recommendations on where to put sites that are the most environmentally responsible and have the least negative impact,” said Leppold. “And time is of the essence with there being a lot of momentum for wind power.”
The studies are also incorporating the use of sophisticated microphones and auditory technology to identify migrating birds.
“We just started using acoustics last fall,” Leppold said. “Bill Evans, who pioneered the technique, helped us along with Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which has a software program that analyzes the recordings.”
UMaine researchers built their own microphones and bought the software program to identify the birds.
Holbertson and Leppold plan to continue these studies for the next three to five years, gathering as much data as possible to use in a variety of applications.
“This gives us good baseline data to put everything in better perspective from climate change effects, development effects and other things,” Holbertson said. “And today’s workshop is here to bring in new partners, bring them up to date, identify our different needs, decide how to allocate our resources best, and build on this.”
It’s a labor of love and fascination for Leppold, a Pennsylvania native who has a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology and is working on her doctorate in biology.
“It wasn’t until I was getting my undergraduate degree and took an ornithology class [that] I was just captivated by the whole thought of flight and how it’s evolved or how it can even happen,” she said. “The more research I’ve done, the more fascinated I’ve become.”