SUNY Plattsburgh Grad Student Researches Whip-poor-will Prevalence in Area Pine Barrens

A SUNY Plattsburgh graduate student’s research could improve the conservation of a bird species that is declining in most other areas of the northeast outside of a unique habitat in Altona, N.Y.

For two months this summer, Caley Doell, a natural resources and ecology master’s student, researched whip-poor-wills, a bird that gets its name from its song.

Guiding the Shrub Oak, N.Y., native through her research is Dr. Mark Lesser, associate professor of environmental science, and Dr. Luke Tyrrell, assistant professor of biological science.

Studying Whip-poor-wills in Altona Flat Rock

After reading a study examining the foraging and breeding behavior of whip-poor-wills in the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, Doell said, “We wanted to do a similar study at the Altona Flat Rock here in the jack pine barrens to figure out how the whip-poor-wills are using the forest here because we knew there was a pretty established population at the Flat Rock, but we weren’t sure how they were using the forest more specifically.”

“Caley’s projects are really important because the jack pine barrens here is classified as a globally rare ecosystem, and whip-poor-wills are often used as an indicator species, which means if whip-poor-wills are doing well, that’s a good indicator of overall ecosystem health,” Tyrrell said.

“You can look at one species and that means things for a lot of other species usually because they’re only going to be doing well if everything is doing well.”

Whip-poor-wills ‘of Interest to DEC’

Tyrrell said whip-poor-wills are of interest to the DEC because they’re declining fairly rapidly even when compared to other bird species except in the jack pine barren of the Altona Flat Rock, which “has probably the highest density of whip-poor-wills anywhere in the northeast.”

Doell said the birds are losing their habitat to land development in many other areas of the northeast.

The group wants to help determine what it is about the Flat Rock property that is beneficial for the birds, which Tyrrell said “could have huge implications for everywhere else.”

Studies have suggested highly fire-disturbed habitats seem to be good for whip-poor-wills, and the jack pine barren “is healthy in large part because it has burned,” Tyrrell said, adding that the traditional forest burns indigenous peoples performed historically decreased when European settlers arrived.

Lesser said it’s important to understand the habitat characteristics and how that benefits the whip-poor-wills because that can be applied to land management action in other locations.

Collaboration with Miner Institute

For her fieldwork, Doell received roughly $6,500 in funding from three sources: New York Audubon grants, Cardinal Career Grants and work as a paid summer research technician for the university.

The Miner Institute purchased the 10 tiny GPS transmitters needed to track the birds for $4,500.

“It’s really wonderful that we have that collaboration with them (Miner),” Lesser said, adding that the group did the fieldwork in the areas of the Flat Rock owned by the institute.

Doell used jewelry cords to create a structure with leg-loop harnesses that made a figure eight and connected to a GPS unit.

“It’s like a little backpack that goes on” the birds, Doell said.

Tyrrell, who has a master bird-banding permit through the U.S. Geological Survey Bird-banding Laboratory, said the backpack-type structure is a standard technique, but people have to make them using supplies found at an arts and crafts store.

Doell said she experimented with materials to make several durable bird decoys and settled on rocks, brown paper, masking paint and tape.

Fieldwork at Night

Whip-poor-wills are “mostly nocturnal but crepuscular foragers, meaning they forage mainly during twilight hours,” Doell said, so fieldwork for this portion of her thesis was done every evening in May and June of this year starting around 7 p.m. and finishing around 10 or 11 p.m.

Lesser drove the Center for Earth and Environmental Science van or used the Miner Institute’s four-wheel drive pickup truck to get to areas the van couldn’t reach.

Since the four stations to catch the birds needed constant monitoring, they needed volunteers to help on different nights.

Providing that assistance were university faculty and students Dr. Danielle Garneau, professor of environmental science; Mark Baran geographic information system instructional support technician; Michael Brockway, education master’s student and geography alumnus; Lucas Kemmerling and Lydia Harvey, both natural resources and ecology master’s students; Meghan Bargabos, who graduated with that master’s degree in May; Madelyn Lehman and Noah Bonesteel.

“It was pretty intensive,” Doell said of the nightly fieldwork, which required headlamps with red lights to not shock the birds with white light.

“The males are really territorial, and they respond to competing calls so we had a speaker and a decoy set up at the bottom of each net and we were playing a looped call over the speaker and competing males would basically come right to the speaker and they’d get caught in the net,” Doell said.

Only Tyrrell and Doell are qualified to handle the birds, so the two walked about the nets and waited until a setup captured a bird. Then they’d take bird’s measurements, fit them with a backpack and band them, Doell said.

“A lot of birds are really difficult and annoying to handle, but whip-poor-wills are really easy. They’re super chill,” Doell said, adding that they fit nicely in the hand.

The ensure the backpacks weighed less than 3 percent of the bird’s body weight, the group was limited to certain GPS devices.

“They don’t make a GPS transmitter small enough that actually sends the points to you. You have to get the transmitter back and so we had to recatch the birds several weeks later and get the data back,” Lesser said.

Doell said this was feasible because male whip-poor-wills are so territorial that they stay in the same general area.

“We recaptured six of our 10 birds,” Doell said, which is what the group was expecting.

Tyrrell said the recapture effort was challenging because they kept catching multiple birds in the same net, which isn’t supposed to happen because of their territorial nature, “but there were so many whip-poor-wills that their territories were overlapping.”

Doell said that issue is not something other studies have encountered since whip-poor-wills aren’t as plentiful elsewhere, adding that “it’s a good problem to have” even though it made the project’s second phase difficult.

Researching Composition of Bird Community

Before this summer’s fieldwork, Doell began her master’s research as an ecology undergraduate at the university with point-counting birds to “get a sense of the entire bird community at the Altona Flat Rock,” Lesser said.

Right after sunrise on many mornings, Doell said she traveled to 24 different points in three separate forest types in the Flat Rock, including areas that burned in wildfires in 1957 and 2018, counting all the bird species she could see or detect based on their songs.

Then she compared her results to a similar study that alumnus Neil Gifford ’91, Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission conversation director, performed while earning his master’s at SUNY Plattsburgh in 1994.

Her resulting paper, “Assessing Bird Populations in a Wildfire Disturbed Jack Pine Barrens,” will soon be submitted to Northeastern Naturalist, Lesser said.

Doell will finish a second paper based on her whip-poor-will fieldwork by the end of the semester and that will also be submitted to an academic journal, he said.

‘Capable and Driven Student’

Tyrrell and Lesser said guiding Doell through her research and fieldwork is enriching for each of them.

“Caley very much drove this research project,” Tyrrell said. “These were all her ideas and things she wanted to do. So having a master’s student like Caley who is so capable, driven and interested in things lets me get interested in new things as well that I might not have done on my own otherwise.”

“Teaching science and research is why I’m here at SUNY Plattsburgh,” Lesser said. “Those are the parts of the job that I love most, is helping students get to the place that Caley is now.”

She graduates with her master’s in December and said she is weighing career paths.

Working with Lesser and Tyrrell has been an enlightening experience, Doell said.

“Gaining the experience in birding and banding and everything from Luke had been really valuable and just gaining experience in the research process and everything throughout my years in the forest ecology lab (with Lesser) has been really great,” she said. “Doing all the fieldwork and hands-on work and the opportunities for that has been pretty amazing.”

— Story By Assistant Director of Communications Felicia Krieg

— Photos by Krieg and Provided