 Welcome everybody! My name is Sally Stockwell and I am happy to have you here with us today to learn about forestry for Maine birds. This is a program that is all about helping landowners, loggers, and foresters manage woodlots in ways that benefit birds and other wildlife. So we're going to walk you through the basics of what forestry for Maine birds is and how you can take the information and apply it to your own woodland. And I have my wonderful partners here with me today, Amanda Mahaffey from the Forest Stewards Guild and Andy Schultz from the Maine Forest Service. And I think I neglected say I'm Sally Stockwell Director of Conservation at Maine Audubon. So this is a wonderful partnership program that we've been working on together for a number of years and we're going to create a series of mini videos that kind of walk you through the essence of a typical workshop. So what is forestry for Maine birds? Well it's it's designed to help breeding birds in Maine with create better habitat for breeding birds. Why are these birds important? Well if you look at this poster over here, you'll see that we have a variety of forest types here in Maine. We have coniferous forests which are sometimes called softwood forest, mixed forests that have both hardwoods and softwoods together, and then deciduous forests that are predominantly otherwise called hardwood forests. And each one of those forest types offers different places for birds to breed, to nest, to raise their young, and to hide from predators. So for example in the coniferous forest you might find black bernian warblers way at the top of a coniferous tree singing their hearts out. You'll notice how brightly beautiful their breast is, and they have a really thin, wispy song that rises up. Kind of like that. And then on the trunk of the tree you might find a blackbath woodpecker. They like old trees that flake off, the bark flakes off, they look for insects under those flakes. Down on the forest floor you might find a Canada warbler. Canada warblers, their populations are declining dramatically, and they like shrubby areas right next to water. And then if you move into the mixed woods where you have both hardwoods and softwoods, you might find a instead of the blackback woodpecker of yellow-bellied sap sucker. That's a type of woodpecker that feeds the drill's holes in trees, and the sap runs, and then they collect the insects that are attracted to that sap. In the middle of the forest you might find Magnolia warblers. They like sort of small evergreen trees, somewhat densely packed together, and they flit around in those forests. Down towards the shrubby area in the understory you might find black-throated blue warblers. They are particularly fond of hobblebush, which is this flowering shrub right there. It's dense enough they can hide in there, they can nest in there. And then if you look in the center of the poster you'll see there's a little opening in the canopy. That opening or gap is a place where you have species like eastern wood peewees or chestnut-sided warblers that will gather in that gap. The peewees will perch on a tree at the edge of the gap and then fly out into the gap to feed on the insect right in that gap. And then if you keep going over into the deciduous or hardwood forest that's where we find species like woodthrush, hermitthrush. The woodthrush likes a really dense canopy over tall dense canopy, pretty good fill in in the central part of the forest as well, and then they nest and breed in that middle story, but they often feed on the forest floor. They'll kick up the leaves on the forest floor and look for insects on that forest floor. And then in the very tops of the big oak trees you often find scarlet tannagers and in fact we have one that's singing right up here behind us. It's not going to sing right now of course, but it has been singing since we arrived. Maine is often referred to as the baby bird factory for the eastern United States. You can see why when you look at this map that National Audubon created of the last best forested acres in all up and down the eastern seaboard. And you'll notice right away that the largest green area occurs right here in Maine. So we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to create good breeding habitat for these different species because if there are no more baby birds, no matter what other threats these species face, their populations will continue to plummet. And we want to try to reverse that if we can. And we need your help. So please join us. Thanks. So our forests here in Maine are extensive. Excuse me. They we have over 17 million acres of forest land here in Maine. We have a wide variety of different types of forests. And that's why we attract so many birds back to breed in these forests. The other thing that our forests provide these birds are lots of insects. So there's amazing stories about how far away our breeding birds come from. On the far right of the poster, if you see the yellow lines, we have species like American Woodcock that come here to breed in the summer, but they live in the southern part of the U.S. during the winter. They move slowly back up to Maine over the course of the spring before they arrive in time for the soil is is thawed and they can find earthworms and other insects in the ground that they feed on. Then we have things like the Scarlet Tanager, species like the Scarlet Tanager, that breeds down in that breeds here in Maine, but then spends the winter down in Central and South America. And my favorite, though, is the Black Pole Warbler because Black Pole Warblers winter down in South America. In the spring, they work their way slowly up through Central America, Mexico, the U.S., and up into Canada, where they will breed in the Alaska, across the Canadian Arctic, and in far northern Maine. But then in the fall, all of those Black Pole Warblers congregate on the coast of Maine. They feed extensively to gain a lot of weight before they then jump off the Atlantic and fly all the way nonstop down to their wintering areas, 88 hours, almost 2,000 miles in one flight. It's truly amazing. So we have this wealth of species that returns every year here in Maine, and yet many of these species are struggling. They are of conservation concern. Their populations have been declining over the last 40 years. In some cases, they've declined 50, 60% of their populations. And we know from recent analysis of the breeding bird survey data that we've lost about a quarter to a third of all our birds compared to 40 years ago. And so we have this wonderful opportunity and responsibility here in Maine to try to create better habitat for these birds to come back and breed successfully. And we can do this along with other landowner and forester goals for how to manage their property. So that's what the Forestry for Maine birds program is all about. And we have, I'm going to pause there and then invite you back for the next step of our video series where Amanda is going to talk about what specific features in the forest these birds are looking for and how you can try to identify them yourself.