As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Friday 26 October 2018

Recording lures endangered bird to Wisconsin woods



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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