By Kaley
Fech | October 10, 2018
By Kaley
Fech
Every day
the love song of a Kirtland’s warbler calls throughout the Bayfield County
Forest in northwestern Wisconsin.
But it
isn’t coming from a bird.
It’s a
recording created to lure the endangered species to the forest.
“We had a
handful of birds on the landscape, but none of them were finding each other,”
said Nick Anich a conservation biologist for the Wisconsin Department of
Natural Resources. “We thought this technique would be a good way to get all
the birds to focus in basically on the same spot.”
He got
the idea from Michael Ward, an avian ecologist for the Illinois Natural History
Survey at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ward has done a
number of projects using audio playback to lure species from one area to
another.
The
technique is referred to as conspecific attraction, meaning it is used to lure
the same species to a new location using cues relevant to that species.
Anich
took the idea a step further. He lures Kirtland’s warblers hundreds of miles
away from their main population centers.
Wisconsin’s
biggest population of Kirtland’s warblers is in Adams County in the lower
center of the state.
The
recording has been successful in drawing birds from there to other parts of the
state, Anich said.
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