Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
by the responses of birds to urbanization. Needing a project that he could
complete in three or four years, he undertook a survey of Seattle's birds, focus-
ing on the inl uence of park size and subdivision coni guration on avian abun-
dance and diversity. But as Roarke counted, he also noticed signs announcing
forthcoming development. In the lab, we talked about the changes to our child-
hood neighborhoods and considered the future of the Seattle area that seemed
eager to trade trees for homes. We decided to begin a study of places destined
for development. Surveys before construction would be useful for Roarke's
study, but for me and a dozen other students who followed his lead, they would
provide the baseline, replication, and controls needed to apply science to my
childhood question of what's going to happen to the animals.
As the 1990s came to an end, we had preliminary counts of birds at i ve
reserves, ten established neighborhoods, and eleven sites slated for develop-
ment. I wrote grants to fund a legion of students and technicians to join me
each spring and summer to count, map territories, catch, band, and i nd nests
of the birds that used each of these sites. Sometimes we had to disguise our-
selves as construction workers or prospective homebuyers to enter our study
areas. Some developers were hesitant to let us watch birds as they cleared the
land, created ponds, and built homes, but my students were undaunted. Resi-
dents also wondered what we were up to with binoculars on their street corners
and back acreage. We explained our study to hundreds of people, including
some who carried badges, Tasers, and guns. By 2010, we had counted birds
during nearly six thousand standardized, ten-minute-long surveys on our
twenty-six sites. That ef ort—during the wee hours of more than i ve hundred
mornings—allowed us to tally more than i fty-i ve thousand individual birds
of 111 species. Our sleep deprivation had produced a detailed picture of how
birds in subirdia responded to the process of urbanization that we could com-
pare with nearby forested reserves and previously settled neighborhoods.
The Avoiders:
In our temperate, evergreen forests we found extinction to
be rare, though a quarter of the small forest birds declined as the new subdivi-
