It’s an hour or so after dawn in the Sterling Forest -- 1,500 acres of mixed northern hardwoods that belongs to the town of Stowe.
The lush woods are crisscrossed with hiking, skiing and mountain bike trails. The forest is also actively managed for timber production. But the morning chorus indicates there’s another beneficiary of this hilly timber lot: songbirds.
Vermont’s vast forests are an important economic and recreational resource. But, like the Sterling Forest, the region’s woodlands are also home to a high concentration of breeding songbirds. These pint-sized, colorful migrants head north each summer to feast on insects and raise their young. They need a wide variety of forest types and structure to thrive.
Forester, loggers and bird conservationists are now working together to improve both forest stewardship and bird habitat.
A leading advocate for that effort is Michael Snyder, a Stowe resident and former country forester who marked trees and oversaw a logging job at the forest several years ago. Snyder is now commissioner of Forest Parks and Recreation. He’s back in the woods to see how they responded to the timber harvest,
Looking at a regenerating patch of softwoods, the song of a Magnolia warbler makes him smile. That’s because on the other side of the logging road – where the trees weren’t cut – the woods are sparse, thin, and quiet. Snyder points out the difference.
“There’s some struggling spruce and fir in the under-story, a dense over-story, a highly competitive situation, not really doing much. And, I might point out, kind of silent over there,” he says. “You look over here where we’ve manipulated it, that’s where all the birds are singing. I think that’s a pretty good indication that we’re on to something here.”
With us on the walk is Kristen Sharpless, a conservation biologist with Audubon Vermont. Armed with a pair of binoculars and an iPhone loaded with a bird song app, Sharpless explains that Vermont’s part of the northern forest is a major refuge for breeding songbirds.
“We’re at the core of their breeding range. They’re common here but not elsewhere. Many of them are experiencing long-term population decline, so they’re at risk,” she says. “And the group we focus on uses a whole variety of forest habitats and conditions.”
Think of the forest as providing different levels of vertical and horizontal structure, almost like a city with both three story home and tall apartment buildings. Each layer in the woods offers different habitat types for different species. The Magnolia warbler prefers the lower levels; its cousin, the Blackburnian warbler, likes the tree canopy.
We come to an area of the hillside where some large sugar maples were removed to create openings. It’s now regenerated with a riot of new hardwood growth. Sharpless explains how openings like this favor certain types of warblers and other species, including a yellow-rumped warbler that’s made this place its summer home.
“There’s a whole group of them that would tend to be in these bigger openings with this regeneration. Those are part of the forest when you get wind disturbance or ice storms or insect outbreaks you would naturally get these openings or gaps,” she says. “And they would be variable in size like this with snags and occasional over-story trees retained. So it doesn’t need to be all uniform and really big to attract these particular groups of birds.”
Sharpless and Snyder say foresters, landowners and bird conservationists can align their goals, harvesting trees while improving these structural aspects of the forest.
Audubon and the Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation have teamed up to offer technical assistance. To date, more than 100 foresters have taken advantage of the training. Snyder says the woods can be managed with birds in mind without sacrificing economic potential.
“If you have that you can maintain those hundreds of thousands of acres in this healthy forest condition continuously, meaning providing goods and services and creating this awesome habitat,” he says.
A black throated blue warbler interrupts his thoughts. Snyder calls the bird the poster child of this kind of forest management.
“With that species, we were really hoping to enhance the habitat, and I believe we have,” he says.
As the sun rises higher, we hear several more warblers, nuthatches, and two species of vireo. A bald eagle – its white head gleaming in the bright light– also soars overheard. Snyder and Sharpless continue through the list:
“Hermit thrush, oven bird, chickadee… Blackburnian. That’s 15. You can call it a forester’s dozen, how about that?” Snyder laughs.
It was an impressive morning of bird watching – and listening – in a forest that produces timber, recreation and song.
