Around We Go – Again

A big decision has recently made by the Hyla Woods team and our wonderful bird research partners.

After cleaning up the mess created by the party held to celebrate 18 years of monitoring birds in a forests and completing a full 15 year cycle of monitoring, we faced the hard decision of “what now?”.  After a good bit of debate and discussion, we have all enthusiastically committed to starting in on another 15 year cycle.  Enthusiasm is high for learning how and why the forests continue to change over the intervening 15 years.

The Tale of Two Numbers  –  In preparation for upcoming monitoring in our Manning Forest, today we cleared brush from the birding route and hunted for, found, and refreshed the painted markings for each of the 11 stops.  Along with noticing our new gray hair, we were surprise by how the painted numbers have faded since we last monitored this route back in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

 

While the work moves ahead with new monitoring, additional work remains to more completely explore what can be learned from the 18 years of carefully collected data we already have.  Help is always welcomed and appreciated.

Our rough calculation came up with a tally of about 1,000 hours invested in the project to date.

We own super thanks to all of our excellent and talented birding helpers – particularly Char Corkran, Lori Hennings, and Linda Craig!  We are also grateful for the advice provided by Dr. Joan Hagar and others.