Projects
Habitat Management Challenge
Golden-winged Warbler Habitat Management in the Great Lakes Region. Photo: Laurie Johnson
In honor of the GWWA Working Group’s 20th Anniversary and the ongoing need to create and maintain suitable early successional habitat for this species of high conservation need, we have launched a Golden-winged Warbler Habitat Challenge! The goal is to encourage a variety of partners to contribute to this effort….
Conservation and research in action at Reserva El Jaguar, Nicaragua
A student holds illustrations of several migratory songbirds that occur in Reserva El Jaguar, including Golden-winged Warbler. Photo:
Reserva El Jaguar is a private reserve located in Jinotega, Nicaragua. It is owned by the Duriaux Chavarría family and is dedicated to conservation, biodiversity protection, research and coffee production. In addition to producing high quality coffee, the reserve protects cloud forest that provides valuable habitat to more than 374 species of birds, of which more than 75 are migratory. The reserve is also home to overwintering Golden-winged Warblers, who occupy habitat in and around the coffee farm and forest reserve…
Cornell's Land Trust Bird Conservation Initiative
Nearly 20 acres were treated with a prescribed burn to create early successional habitat on the Bear Creek Preserve. Photo: Josh Saltmer
Over 56 million acres are protected by land trusts and private conservation organizations in the United States, creating a network of private, protected lands twice as large as the National Park Service system in the lower 48. These lands are important to hundreds of common bird species and critical to the more than 100 species of conservation significance that have at least 50% of their breeding distribution on private lands. The Cornell Land Trust Bird Conservation provides small grant funds to facilitate high priority, bird-focused conservation projects. Partners are encouraged to use the awarded funds to leverage additional dollars from community groups and other funding agencies, as well as create capacity to accomplish conservation goals. To meet this objective, the Cornell Lab…
Outreach on West Virginia's private lands
A team of foresters and biologists visit landowners in West Virginia to consult on a potential Working Lands for Wildlife GWWA project. Photo: Liz Brewer
Golden-winged Warblers thrive in dynamic forested landscapes that are a composition of mature forest and young, shrubby habitat such as found in regenerative clearcuts and boggy wetlands. Working with private landowners to create and maintain enough young forest habitat across the landscape is crucial to help recover declining Golden-winged Warbler populations. In West Virginia, 88% of the state’s 12 million acres of forest are privately owned. The scale of outreach needed to inspire enthusiasm for young forests could be a full-time job in West Virginia and, in fact, that was exactly what several partners decided the state needed.…
Solving the mysteries of Golden-winged Warbler adult survival
A Nano-tagged female Golden-winged Warbler.
Photo: Emily Filiberti
This collaborative effort aims to develop an integrated population model (IPM) for assessing the population viability and current and future breeding distribution of the Golden-winged Warbler using the latest advances in wildlife tracking technology. Traditional mark-recapture methods have proved insufficient for determining adult female survival – females are more difficult to recapture and detect in the field than male counterparts. Biologists across the Golden-winged Warbler breeding range are deploying VHF-radio tags to find the first reliable estimates of female Golden-winged Warbler survival…
Biologists set up a mist-net in Honduras
Photo: Ruth Bennett