Breeding Bird Monitoring at Isle Royale National Park, Michigan

To successfully manage a landscape, it is necessary to have a basic knowledge of local species and how those species fare over time. Avian communities have been viewed as possibly the most straight-forward and useful group of organisms to both survey and use as a proxy of overall community health, including primary productivity (Lin et al. 2008). Songbirds are commonly studied by land managers because male advertisement (singing) provides a relatively simple way to identify species during the breeding season and because the varying habitat requirements of birds offer an opportunity to detect broader changes in the landscape (May 1982; Etterson et al. 2007).