Forest Songbirds - Kouchibouguac

Songbirds are indicators of habitat conditions within forest or bog ecosystems, as these species have a high level of specialisation to various ecological niches and are extremely sensitive to natural processes. In consequence, these communities can demonstrate a rapid response to a broad range of environmental or successional changes at several spatial scales. The purpose of the forest songbirds monitoring program at Kouchibouguac National Park is to detect changes in the occurrence of 20 selected avian indicator species over time within specific habitat types: closed-canopy coniferous forest, open-canopy coniferous forest, deciduous forest, closed-canopy mixedwood forest, open-canopy mixedwood forest, late-seral bog, and open bog. The methods for this measure involve the monitoring on a 5-year cycle of 119 point-count stations in summer from mid-May to early August at the early morning hours to correspond with an increase in bird activity. The prescribed sampling time is 20-minutes each to maximize species detection but is divided in four 5-minute periods, which allows for comparisons with other data based on different listening durations. All birds detected through sight or sound are documented as well as other information such as weather conditions, quadrant or location, distance from observer(s), and species behavior. Each station is visited twice during the sampling period following an inverse order, to limit any bias linked to the period of the morning that stations are observed. A two-week waiting period is applied between visits to the same station, to account for variability in the detectability of individual species during different stages of the breeding cycle.