 Hi, my name is Cameron Duquette and I'm a PhD student at North Dakota State University's range science program. As you may or may not know, grassland birds have undergone a steep decline in recent years and when you consider the impacts to North America's grasslands, it's easy to see why. North America has lost 80% of its historic grassland cover due to land use change. Grassland birds are sensitive to vegetation structure and natural disturbances like fire and grazing served in the past to keep vegetation structure diverse and support a wide variety of grassland bird species. Since our grasslands historically experience fire and grazing, you can think of grassland vegetation as along a continuum, ranging from short-statured vegetation with little to no litter to areas that have not burned in a long time and have high litter, our grass dominated, and some woody cover. Species have varying preferences along this gradient. Some, like chestnut-colored longsperrs and kielbier, prefer to nest and forage in open areas without much vegetation cover, while other species, like clay-colored sparrows and bobble ink, prefer areas with thick litter. Seasonal grazing systems tend to homogenize vegetation towards the middle, so you have grass dominated and all of your vegetation is the same height. And this fails to provide diverse habitat requirements for a broad range of species. So what we wanted to do is see if other grazing practices had the potential to enhance grassland bird habitat. So we compare traditional season-long grazing to patch-burn grazing and twice-over-rotational grazing in terms of grassland bird community composition and nest success. So you'll probably hear a lot about patch-burn grazing today, but for the uninitiated, I'll go over it really quickly. So the basic idea is that each year you burn part of your pastures, and then when that regrowth comes back, it's high protein and low lignin content, so the cattle really prefer it. They graze the heck out of it and keep it short, and that allows the other areas to grow up. And so from year to year, you're moving that disturbance around the pasture. We burn our pastures on a four-year rotation, and so you get that diversity of vegetation across the landscape, so that gradient that I was talking about. And so to assess how the birds are responding, every year from 2017 to 2020, we perform nest dragging surveys through our pastures to find grassland bird nests. So we stretched a 100-foot-long rope between two people. It had aluminum cans tied to it, and the idea is the cans rattle around and scare the adult birds off the nests, and that allows us to find them, because they're pretty secretive. So after that, we would go back to found nests every three days or so and assess the nest fate, so whether the nest had fledged, hatched, or been depredated or abandoned. Once nests were done, we performed vegetation surveys at the nest, and that way we could relate the nest conditions to nest survival. We also assessed community composition, so what birds are using these habitats. And we walked transects through our pastures throughout the breeding season, and for this we compared patch burn, season-long grazing, and twice-over-rotational grazing pastures. And we looked at the composition of species in each, as well as the diversity in each. So overall, we detected 60 species in our transect surveys, and we found that responses to the treatments varied by species, which makes sense, because you've got a variety of requirements based on what species you're looking at. So for instance, grasshopper sparrows, they specialize in kind of the middle of that gradient, and they're also not the most selective, so we didn't find a significant difference between the treatments. Whereas on the other hand, clay-colored sparrows nest by weaving tall grasses into the base of shrubs, so we found that in the twice-over-rotational and season-long pastures, we found that they were more abundant there. And on the other end of the spectrum, chestnut-colored longspirrs, which if you remember, they prefer that newly burned, short vegetation. We found that they reached their highest abundance in the patch burn pastures. And then as far as nesting, we didn't see a huge variation in nest survival between the treatments, but again, we saw that the patch burning allowed the species to select the vegetation structure that they prefer. So we found over 1,900 nests over four years from 32 species, including nine species of waterfowl, six species of shorebird, and 13 species of passerine. So that's your perching birds. So we found, again, clay-colored nest success was higher, where visual obstruction was high, which is going to be more prevalent in the rotational and season-long, whereas in contrast, grasshopper sparrows nest survival was higher when you have those shorter vegetation types. And so I think altogether, our research shows that a wide variety of habitat requirements requires a wide variety of management schemes. So patch burn grazing pastures had the highest diversity followed by the season-long pastures and then the twice-overrotational. But in the twice-overrotational with that more substantial vegetation structure, it provides important habitat for some conservation-concerned species like bobbling. So I think the take-home here is that there are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and as long as you're getting diverse habitat conditions in your rangelands, you're providing for grassland bird diversity.