 they're not able to join tonight. So thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you all tonight. This idea came about when Karen and I were on a little backpack excursion up in Baxter State Park and I was telling her a little bit about this program and she said geez I think maybe that would be a good one for our main master naturalists folks to hear about. So what I'm going to talk about is our forestry for main birds program at Maine Audubon. We started this in about 2013 and it's just been growing exponentially since then and it's really about how to work with landowners, foresters, and and loggers on how to manage your woodlands in a way that benefits not just trees but birds and other wildlife. So I'm not getting it to go forward. Let's see. There we go. Well so why birds? You know we picked birds. I'm sure some of you are birders in the group and others of you may be more interested in other kinds of natural history items but bird we know from surveys that have been done of woodland owners across the country that birds matter to landowners and they are easy you know they're bright, they're colorful, they're cheerful with their songs, they are relatively easy to see and find compared with lots of other wildlife that might be slinking around through the woodlands and in addition to that you know they can be surrogates for other wildlife, efficient wildlife that use the forest. So in addition to you know if you manage your woodland to benefit different kinds of birds then you also benefit all kinds of other wildlife, fish, water quality, and provide opportunities for people to recreate including hunting and fishing if you are interested in that sort of thing. And another reason why we've focused in on birds is because we know based in particular based on some recent studies that have been done that birds are really struggling. So there was an excellent overview on this topic done in 2019 by the National Association of Bird Conservation Initiative in Canada where they put out this State of the Canada's Birds report and then National Audubon also that same year released a study called 389 bird species on the brink which looked specifically at how climate change might be affecting birds. And so in the State of Canada's Birds report this is a great graph that sort of illustrates what they discovered after looking at data over a long period of time since 1970 based on about 13 or 14 different data sets including the breeding bird survey that are done nationally every year. And so you can see that that many species have seen a dramatic decline, are seen a dramatic decline since the 1970s. The only ones that are really doing better are our waterfowl and our raptors. And really that's because in the case of the waterfowl there's been so much emphasis placed on trying to find and protect their breeding habitat. Ducks Unlimited has been really involved in that effort and then for the raptors that increase is largely due to the ban on DDT. But everything else is either somewhat stable or slightly declining or substantially declining. And forest birds are one of those groups that is slowly declining. Another study, similar study, was done released in the Journal of Science last year that also looked at the changes in bird populations and they're able to document that those declines that you just saw in that previous slide amount to a loss of almost three billion birds since 1970. And so what does that that look like? You know we've seen just steady decline across many different species groups, some more so than others. And this gives you a nice little illustration that comes from Cornell Lab of Hornophology. Our most dramatic declines have been seen in our grassland birds and in shorebirds but we also are seeing significant declines in our boreal forest birds, a number of which nest and breed in northern Maine in addition to much of Canada and then in our eastern forest birds. So anywhere from 17% less or fewer to 53% fewer birds since the 1978. That's a big decline. You know I've talked to some old timers here who started birding when they were young and they tell me over and over again how there just aren't as many birds out there as there used to be. Not as many species, not as many individuals of those species. Here's one example of the Canada Warbler. This is sort of a poster child of a species that has seen this dramatic decline and you can see on the graphic in the upper right the areas that are sort of that brownish color, tannish color are areas where they're decreasing. So they're decreasing across much of their range, not the entire range but across most of the range and that's really concerning. So National Audubon also did this big study where they looked at all this data, habitat data and what kinds of different habitats, different species key into and if the climate is going to warm under different scenarios, what does that look like for our different birds and what they've found for the Atlantic flyway is that under a warming scenario of two degrees Celsius we've got about 18 species that are highly vulnerable, 88 that are moderately vulnerable and 60 that are low vulnerable. And so what does that look like? Well here's one example for the woodthrush. We know that woodthrush, excuse me, are already struggling. Their populations have declined quite a bit but the map on the left here shows what the current range is and the map in the middle is what it might look like with a 1.5 degree increase by the year 2080 which sounds like a really long time away but it's not as long as we think. And so you can see the red areas are where their population are going to be declining. The blue areas are places where they're going to be expanding and by under a even higher warming scenario you'll see that much of the east is lost basically as a viable range for woodthrush. Maine is doing okay, you know there still be here but there may be fewer of them and then they'll be expanding up into the Maritimes and southern Quebec. So let's take a little bit closer look at what those studies have shown for our forest birds. As you saw earlier 17 percent decline and but that decline is across 64 percent of all species. So it's not limited just to a few. The majority of our species are showing significant decline and if you want to think about how many birds we're talking about we're talking about 167 million birds. Under the boreal bird forest birds it gets even worse 33 percent decline overall over 50 percent 50 percent of all species showing decline and a loss of 501 million birds. So another way to think about this is that nearly one in four of all of our eastern forest birds and one in three of all of our boreal forest birds that used to be here in 1970 are no longer with us. So they're not we're not seeing them in our woods anymore. So we came up at well Vermont started a program a number of years ago called Foresters for the Birds and we learned about this project and decided hey we should bring this to Maine and so you know why Maine why Vermont what you're seeing on this slide is a map of the breeding bird survey routes that are run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. These are the routes that have been run since 1970 and the dark red colors show that we see more forest birds on our routes than almost anywhere else in the country other than the upper Midwest of northern Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota. So you know this is where forest birds live and another example of that is here's a map showing that National Audubon put together that shows where are the last remaining blocks of forest habitat and you'll see what jumps right out at you right that that big block of forest in Maine. It's the last best place that we have for these forest birds and these birds travel from far away to come back to Maine every year to breed. It's a long perilous journey they have to fly both ways in any given year. Why do they do that? Because we have over 17 million acres of forest land here it's full of diverse types of forest and different age forests there's lots of trees and places for them to nest. We also have abundant insects and I'm not talking about black flies and mosquitoes although we have put the of those I'm really talking about our caterpillars. The adults will feed their young caterpillars that they're kind of like protein pills and we have really long days which means that they have a lot of hours during the day in which to collect those caterpillars bring them back to their young feed their young to the tune of sometimes they can actually produce two or three clutches in one season. So this area is so important to our eastern forest birds that we have over 90 different species of birds that nest in our forests and it has been designated as a globally important bird area by National Audubon. You can see there really aren't that many places that are that reach that level of significance and it's the largest area in all of the United States that is designated as a globally significant bird important bird area. These are areas where there are either concentrations of a lot of individuals of one or two species or places where there are lots of different species with lots of different individuals of those species which is the case here in our forests. So forestry for main birds is really designed as I mentioned earlier to work with forest land owners and managers to help create great breeding habitat for these birds and it's a collaboration between Main Audubon, the Main Forest Service, the Main Department of Inland Fisheries Wildlife, and the Forest Stewards Guild. And this is kind of the little picture of what the forest means to our birds. As you can see here different species use different types of forest and different parts of the forest. Some like to be in the tops of the trees, some like to be down near the ground, some like to be near water, some need dead snags. And so you can pack if you have lots of different types of forest and lots of different features within that forest then you can pack a lot of different species and a lot of different individuals of each species into the forest. And you can see a schematic over there on the right with different migratory pathways for different species. We have our short distance migrants, yellow that points out for something like a woodcock, our medium distance for something like a scarlet tannager, and then these really long migratory pathways for blackpaw warblers. And one of the most amazing things about blackpaw warblers is that while you can see two different pathways going north, they breed in northern Maine and then they breed mostly up in Canada and up into Alaska. But in the fall they all come back to Maine and then jump off the coast on their way down to South America. It's an 1800 mile flight and sometimes takes them something like 48 hours to not stop to get there. So these are tough birds but they need our help. So what we did is we identified 20 different species that are representative of a whole suite of other species that use different types of habitats and different features within the forest. And this is our little collection here of the 20 different species. And what we've done is we've created a series of guidebooks that talks about the habitat needs of each of these different species and then how you can sort of help create the habitat that they need. So we put together a guide for woodland owners, for loggers, for foresters, and then we have these fun little bird and habitat trading cards that you can put on a key ring and carry carry into the woods with you for quick reference. And this is what a page from the forester's guide looks like. The forester's guide is the most technical guide. The other ones have are sort of derived from that first one. But for each species we've got a picture, identification, the forest conditions they like, and then this nice little schematic that shows the type of habitat that they prefer. On the side of each page it'll tell you which type, which of the four major forest types they like. This is oak pine, northern hardwood, northern mixedwood, or northern softwood, and then whether they like young, intermediate, or old forests, ages the best. And so I'm going to show you just some of the species that we have identified as our priority bird species. Most of these species have risen to the level of being a priority species because either their populations are showing significant decline, a large percentage of their global population breeds here in the northeast, or they are uniquely found in northern Maine, particularly for arboreal bird species, and you just don't see them very many other places in the U.S. So for our northern softwood species we've got things like the bay breasted warbler, which keys in and let's tell you a little fun fact about each of these species. I'm not going to go into great detail, but bay breasted warblers are one of those species that cues into the spruce bud worm. And when you see an elevation in the number of spruce bud worm, like we're seeing up in Quebec lakes right now, then these birds along with Cape Maine warblers and Blackpool warblers and Tennessee warblers, their population just explodes. And last summer I happened to be up in the Gas Bay Peninsula in Quebec and they were everywhere because they are having an outbreak of spruce bud worms. So these birds actually respond to that outbreak and then they help keep that outbreak in control. Our black-throated green warblers, you typically find in some sort of hemlock stand or other softwood stand, midway in the canopy. Blackback woodpeckers are really tied to these older trees with flaky bark on them because they go after the insects underneath that flaky bark. Perula warblers, you often see at the tops of tall softwood trees, but they really you'll only find them where they have the Spanish moss or old man's beard moss hanging down because that's what they used to make their nest with. Boreal chickadees are very much tied in with our softwood stands, typically kind of a middle-aged sort of stand. And then in some of the gap openings you might find all-of-sided fly catchers. And then when we switch to northern mixedwood, so this would be part softwood part hardwood species. Blackburnian warblers love to be way up at the very tops of those trees high, singing high, high up in the tops of the trees. When that sunlight hits that orange breast, man, it just wants to knock you over. And then coming down from the tops of the forest to the middle of the forest or lower, the Magnolia warblers really like dense stands of softwoods. I've seen them most often, honestly, in bogs where you have these stunted growth of hemlock and spruce and fur, and they like to hide right in those, but you also find them in regenerating stands or young stands of softwoods, excuse me, that are coming back up after harvest. And then something like Blackthroatia blue warbler likes to be down near the lower part of the forest in what's called hobble bush in particular. They like to nest and hang out in the hobble bush. And Canada warblers are found in really dense shrubby areas right near water, very low, they nest right on the ground. And then our yellow-bellied sap suckers, of course, are very tied in with dead or decaying trees, where they drill these little holes, sap runs out in those holes, and they will go after either the sap or the insects that are attracted to the sap. And then we are moving to our northern hardwood species. And we have, again, the yellow-bellied sap sucker. And the eastern wood peeweed, this is another species that is found in small gap openings in the forest. Veeries, which are one of our many thrushes, along with our hermitthrush and our woodthrush and robins. And veeries are often found in the sort of mid-story area, the middle part of the forest, but they like to hang out on the ground where they are kicking aside leaves, picking up insects from the moist soil, and they are often found near water. And then chestnut-sided warglers are one of those species that really likes young forest that is growing back up after a bunch of other trees have fallen over and opened up a gap within the forest. And then finally, down here in southern Maine, where we have oak pine forest, the dominant type of forest, we see our woodthrush and hermitthrush, but this woodthrush, scarlet tannagers love to be, they love really big, old oak trees. They often are singing from the very tops of those oak trees. Flickers are sort of our common woodpecker in the oak pine forest. And although you often see them in open areas on lawns or cemeteries or something like that, they need forest to nest in because that's our cavity nesters. So they need those decaying standing trees. And then oven birds are really only found where you have a good thick leaf litter layer because they use that to create a nest that looks just like an oven with a side opening on the forest floor. So as you can see, we have different species that are using different types of forest and different places within the forest. So what we try to do with our Forcing for Main Birds program is go out into a stand or on somebody's property and do what we call a quick habitat assessment. All you need for that are six fingers, six or 10. You can use somewhere between. And so this was a workshop that we did where we have a number of different folks that are learning how to do this quick habitat assessment. Well, what are they looking for? And what are we looking for with that assessment? You want to look for canopy trees where you might find a scarlet tanager. Do we have any big tall canopy trees? Looking for some canopy gaps where you might find that eastern wood peewee. We're looking for a dense mid-story where something like the wood thrush would be flying around and calling. We're looking for snags and cavity trees for our yellow-bellied sap-suckers. We're looking for a dense understory. Where's the hobble bush? There really isn't any in this picture here, right, for the black-throated blue-wormler. And then what's on the ground? Do we have some leaves leaf litter on the ground for oven birds? Do we have some dead wood that can be used by roughed grouse and other species that are dependent on that downwood material? So let's take another quick look at this. For the habitat assessment, as I said, we've got 10 fingers that we can use. Each finger sort of represents a different feature within the forest that we're looking for. It's a great way to kind of remember what's important from the bird's perspective and what do you see as you're looking around. So we're looking for the gap openings. Is there an overstory, mid-story, an understory layer? Is there water nearby? Is there any leaf litter? You're not going to get leaf litter in a soft wood stand, but in a hardwood stand or in a mixed hardwood softwood stand, that's important. Is there fine woody material? Like these tree tops here are coarse woody material, which would be these big logs down on the ground. Are there dead stags or decaying trees where our woodpeckers can nest? And then do we have any big, really big, old trees? So it's, and we have a more technical form that you can fill out and we provide that to foresters and others who really want a more quantitative approach towards identifying the habitat values that are present and values that you might want to create over time. But the quick habitat assessment is what we use for most landowners and interested folks like yourselves. So again, the first thing we're looking for is the forest type age and tree size. Oak pine, northern softwood, northern hardwood, mixed wood. And then next we're looking for different vegetation layers. And we have three different layers that we focus in on. The overstory, which is over 30 feet high. The mid-story, which is six to 30 feet high. And then the understory, which is zero to six feet high. And as you can see by this schematic, different species, again, cue into each of those different layers. And some need a lot of vegetation in all three layers, or you just won't find them there, even though they might spend most of their time in either the overstory or the mid-story, for example. And then we know that dead standing wood like snags are really important. And essentially, the bigger the better and the more the better. So, piliated woodpeckers, for example, need a snag that's at least over 14-inch diameter at breast height. And if you don't have big old snags like that, you're not going to have piliated woodpeckers. Some of our smaller species that are cavity nesters like chickadees don't need quite as big a snag. And then down woody material is really important for a variety of reasons. Rough grouse will drum on those hollow logs. That's how they flap their wings and they create this sound that reverberates through the logs when they're trying to attract their mate. But things like fissure and marten and squirrels all use down woody material to move through the forest as well. And they are hunting often in these areas because they might find small mammals or amphibians and reptiles underneath those logs. And then I don't have a picture but the collection of fine woody material, sort of tree tops, branches that are piled, are also really valuable for many of our forest birds because they'll hide in there from predators or they will be searched in those areas. And then, as I mentioned, the leaf litter can be really important for some species like this oven bird. Isn't that just an amazing little picture there coming on the side that's right down on the ground? And in some cases, in some places mostly outside of Maine, we're starting to see now places where the leaf litter has been completely eaten away by non-native earthworms. Well, all of our earthworms are non-native but they've gotten so abundant they become so abundant that they've stripped the ground cover away. So one of the things that we also encourage people to look for are signs of invasives whether it be on the ground or up in the trees. We have beetles, emerald ash borer beetles. We have hemlock woolly adelgid that's coming into our forest that are potential threats to the livelihood of some of our tree species. This is our little spruce budworm caterpillar that I mentioned earlier that Kate Manywar was queuing on. They are native but they have this boom and bust cycle so they about every 40 years or so they will explode. So the bottom line that we're trying to encourage folks to try to do to help our birds here in Maine is to promote diverse mature forest stands. And these are stands that have lots of vegetation in the overstory, the mid-story, and the understory. They have small gaps that mimic natural disturbance because the natural disturbance in Maine was largely from big old trees that would die and fall over or a windstorm that would come through and knock out a small patch of trees. And so what we suggest is if you're going to create these small gaps, keep them under two acres anywhere from a tenth of an acre to two acres. We're not talking about clear cuts here. There are some species that will use and actually prefer really young forests but there's a lot more young forests in Maine than old forests. So we're trying to promote this these mature forest stands. We know we need dead standing trees and dead down trees in the forest to have a full complement of species and you usually don't get those until you've had an older forest where the trees have been allowed to grow old enough and long enough where they actually have natural are dying naturally and then falling over. And then you know paying special attention to streams and other water bodies and how to protect the forest alongside those water bodies is really important as well. And in some cases we we don't have a lot of really mature forest or late successional stands in Maine but where you do have them it's really important to save these what we're calling legacy trees. In addition to the wildlife habitat value they also are excellence at storing carbon and also when you have a more mature diverse forest with different species, different ages, different types then it is more likely to be resilient in the face of a changing climate. So from a landscape perspective you know different different landowners have more or less ability to really manage and and create the kind of habitat we might like for our birds depending on the size of their property and the what's happening around them but on a larger scale landscape scale goal what we're really trying to encourage is more of this mature older and mature forest on the landscape. Historically that is pre-settlement Maine's landscape was somewhere around 80 to 85 percent in mature forest stand these are stands that would be over really over 150 years old. Today our older and mature forest stands together take up somewhere between two to four percent of the landscape of Maine. So we have very few we have lots we have a lot of this intermediate age particularly in the southern half of the state and then in the far northern part of the state where there's been pretty extensive harvest activity on commercial lands there's a lot of young forest and so we'd like to see a better balance between these different age forests and we'd like to see more older and mature forest because that's where the you're going to find more birds and the other thing we're encouraging is to protect and connect diverse landscapes so we know that the more biogeographically diverse the landscape is the more likely we are to see that persist over time even as the climate is changing so where we have mountains and valleys and lakes rivers wetlands and all of those are connected using what we're calling stream smart connections that are large enough so that the stream can really behave the way it wants to at different water levels and both aquatic fish and other animals can move up and down the stream and some of our semi terrestrial terrestrial animals can also move along the side we know that's really really important for the long-term sustainability of our forests and our forest wildlife birds and other species as well so that's a quick introduction to our forestry for Maine birds program and our forest birds that we're keen into I for more information I would encourage you to go to our website if you're interested we have tons of information we have the three different guidebooks I mentioned we have more graphic illustrations that are on the website we have a virtual folder with a lot more information in it this is emblematic of the folders we give people during workshops out in the field we have additional resources for both landowners and foresters we have them the habitat assessment forms you can use if you want to go out and do your handy assessment we have trading cards that you can print out and cut up and take out with you in the field and we have a whole suite of videos that we've just created this past spring and fall since we couldn't do live workshops we wanted to try to recreate that through a series of videos and we have some webinars that are recorded there too but um so I think that's it and I would be very happy to answer any questions at this time so let me stop sharing my screen awesome Sally that was great tons of good info um I have a quick question have you been um I know you've you've given this talk and kind of gotten smaller landowners and smaller smaller forestry concerns going with this have you been have you reached out to or have you connected with any of the larger forestry some of the industrial you know paper companies and stuff about we have we've actually when we first started doing workshops for this program we targeted for professional foresters both consulting foresters and foresters that were working for the larger landowners and a lot of those folks came and they were really interested in the program but I'll tell you a couple of them said right out front to me well yeah this this looks really great but you know that managing for mature forest characteristics that should probably happen on public lands or other private conservation lands that's that's that's not really our thing so I think that you know that's a big challenge for us because obviously there's a lot of acreage forest acreage that is tied up in those lands however there's there's a lot that I mean a private small private landowners own a lot of forestland in Maine as well and we have gotten good response from a lot of we've been working particularly with smaller landowners in western Maine and then also in the Kennebec region in fact if any of you are woodland owners and you live in either of those areas we we have funding available to help you put together what we're calling bird and wildlife friendly management plans and then get funding to actually implement strategies that can help create these structural features we're we're pushing for and the other great thing is that the I didn't mention this but in our partnership with the the Maine Forest Service all of the district foresters and I think there's about nine of them now seven and nine of them have been through our training and when they go out and talk to wood woodland owners they will bring this information with them they will provide it to landowners they will say hey you know if you're interested in birds or if you're interested in wildlife here's this program that we'd like like you to know about and they have told us that because of this program forestry for Maine birds they're starting to see land owners reach out to them that never ever would have reached out to them before well because of the birds because they see the connection awesome got a question coming in how many acres and how many acres comprised of in private uh sorry how many acres comprised of private woodland yeah so we we work with people who have at least 10 acres and you know the more the better one of the things I didn't mention is that some of our bird species that we're targeting are what are called interior forest nesting birds so they like a forest that's at least 250 acres and woodthrush for example you you find more individuals per acre and you find more uh success when they are not only have that 250 acres of forest but when that forest is in another block of forest land that's around 2,500 acres so one of the things that I that we like to encourage people to think about is what does your woodland look like and what are the surrounding neighbors lands look like as well so for example if you are the only one with young forest around then maybe you want to keep it in young forest so you provide some different habitat in the area but more often than not you know it's the older forest is what's missing and so can you work together with your neighbors we have we have in several situations we have neighbors that know each other that have come together and said hey we'd like to put together a management plan for these areas together and sometimes that can be you know 500 acres between two people and we you know I'm not the forester I'm the wildlife biologist so I would I depend on our forestry partners to help figure out well if there's not very much mid-story what do we do to get that and based on what your forest looks like now and we want to create more mid-story what is it that we would have to do to get that 10 20 30 years from now and it's been fun with some of the foresters when I after we've done work typically we'll do a workshop that is combines a presentation like this followed by two to three four hours out in the field and we'll go to different stands we'll do the habitat assessments we'll take a look at what's here now what would we like to see what's missing what would we like to see how do we get there and I so many times I've had foresters say things like you know I will never look at the forest the same way because they're typically are trained to think about the timber values or the pulp values they're not trained to see the whole forest they're not they they have no idea I've had people say to me geez I had no idea I just thought there were a bunch of warmers out here I know I had no idea there were all these other types of birds out here or I had no idea they use different parts of the forest so it's really eye-opening for people birds are great for that eye-opening yeah yeah what's going on it gets them to think about and look at different parts of the forest yep another question Mary Grace asks is it valuable having foresters visit property that is 15 acres and is not intimately connected to another stand sure because there's still things you can probably do with that 15 acre parcel and the district foresters I encourage anybody who's interested to call up your district forester you can find their names right on the main forest service website and ask them to come out and visit that's what they that's what their job is to go out and visit with people and do a walk and talk and they can help you identify what your goals for the property might be and then how to accomplish those goals it's it's all about what do you want to do with your land and how can I help you get there if you decide you want to do any kind of harvesting then they would steer you towards working with a consulting forester because they don't actually do that they're not the ones that put together the forest management plan or that oversee a harvest working with a logger and that sort of thing but they they're a great first contact person and then can steer you to the next step whatever that might be got a request to repeat the area as you mentioned where funding is available western Maine stretching from about the New Hampshire border lakes country just close to Bridgeston up towards Moosehead Lake and then also the lower Kennebec watershed so most of that Kennebec watershed and there's more information on our website you can go there there's actually maps there that will show which towns are within each of those two areas where we have funding available all right Lynn asks do you recommend planting specific species in specific locations as part of your plans and and in specific numbers of trees Maine is a little bit unusual in that there's not very much tree planting that happens in our forest management profession it's it's more like okay i got a bunch of i got a bunch of spindly trees here and then i have another really nice looking oak here maybe i will cut a few of these spindly trees and leave the good oak so it can grow bigger and and have a larger crown in it so that the scarlet tanagers will come and then it'll also open up some more sunlight to get on the forest floor and that means that naturally seedlings will start growing so there may be more oak trees there there may be some white pine that gets started and so it's it's what we call what the foresters call natural regeneration is there's not so much planting and Maine is it's not like in the southeast where there almost everything down there is planted here foresters depend more on natural regeneration you could still plant you know there are there are places where that is is an option but it's not the typical approach let's see i think questions are over can i ask a question oh yeah i didn't notice um so the the percentage of population decline in the western forests in the boreal forest are a lot larger than the percentage decline in the eastern forest are there specific practices or um or differences between those regions that are leading to that difference uh i don't really know the answer to that question uh do you know what the percentage for for the western forest uh it was something i think the eastern was a 17 percent decline whereas the western was 33 and boreal was maybe even a little more than that i mean i'm i'm gonna take a guess here but i'm first of all they're they don't have nearly as many different species out there as what we have here but also you know a lot of those western forests particularly more recently have been hit hard by things like the bark beetle and and just habitat alteration because there's so much development out there and fewer larger tracks of forests so that's that's a guess on my part but i don't really know thank you yeah um i'd like to ask a question as well sally we seem to have the eruption of the pine siscans and the evening growth speaks and red poles already is there any reason for that that you would tell us about um michael do you want to take a stab at that you were just talking about gross speaks um let's see i think i i didn't do the reading up on this so i don't have an educated an educated guess i'm guessing it's a food resource thing where there's more food south and they're sort of following the food and or there's been a bumper crop of nestlings this year and they're all traveling down but i don't really know if you're gonna help me out with that yeah you know with with the eastern gross speaks they are definitely one of those species that responds to big cone years like if there's a if there's a year when there's been abundant cones and not associated with the cones then they they will their population will expand and then they'll start moving around they're very nomadic so they will move different places to try to figure out where that newest crop is um with pine siscans and red poles it's probably more of a maybe maybe there was a big year maybe it was a good year for them reproductive wise up north and now they're moving south with the weather and they're just looking for food awesome sally can you talk a little bit about um i was actually uh there was a offering from uh someone in kentucky uh looking for white oak acorns this year and i have white oaks and i have red oaks and i offered her my white oak acorns and i have not had a one can you talk about um mast ears and how that affects you you didn't have any white acorns no wow how are your red oak acorns doing oh a gazillion yes um so the crazy thing about yeah mast is super mast like a we like acorns like beach nuts are really important for a wide variety of wildlife species we've had three big years of red oak acorns in a row which is highly unusual and because they but you know you probably heard some of the information that's come out in the last few years about how trees talk to each other a lot more than we ever knew that they talk to each other so they coordinate uh all producing a big crop the same year and with oaks it's often of either a four to six seven year cycle and so it's we've had these unusual back-to-back years where they've been producing a lot this year i heard that i read that it was probably because of the drought so the oaks are feeling very stressed and so they're producing lots of acorns to and dropping their leaves earlier because they want to get ahead they think trouble is coming so they want to get their seeds out there while they can but the reason that they coordinate and they all produce the acorns at the same time or the beach at the same time is so that there are so many out there at least some of them have a good chance of reproducing instead of being eaten by chipmunks and squirrels and jays and whatever and the deer and the turkeys everybody else who loves acorns does that get at your question yeah i'm just so disappointed because i really wanted to help this person who's yeah i don't know why i don't know why the white oaks would be different and uh and another on the same property we have all these beach trees none of which are very big they're all horrible they're all cankered um but this year for the first time in several years they've there's been a great production of beach nuts uh-huh again uh you know maybe it's related to the drought too i don't know anyway but the the beach yeah the beach are so um so many of our beach are diseased it's it's lucky if they get big enough to produce a good crop right well anyway so and and i guess um since no one else is raising their hand i have um this forest that we have um is small maybe 15 acres total and um there are a lot of terrible beach and saplings the biggest trees are the hemlocks really the biggest trees the hemlocks and the oaks um and you sort of addressed this earlier about thinning out the the skinny little trees so that um you know that's a lot of skinny little trees and uh i guess we could go in there with uh a chainsaw and just drop them and you know get them out of do you think that's worth it um i guess maybe the far having the forester come in would be a way to assess that yeah having a district forester come by would be great and yeah i think that um the best thing the best way to think about it is which trees do you want to keep as opposed to which trees do you want to get rid of and the foresters are often thinking about what which ones do i want to take which ones right now have the best economic value do i want to take out and really long term you want to be thinking about which ones do i want to leave so they're going to grow better and be here for a longer period of time so then you then that will determine what you want to do with those saplings and if you just left them and did nothing eventually they would thin out some of them would thin out and die over time but they can be then your nice oaks and hemlocks may not get as big as they might otherwise if you give them a little more space and light and air jane typed in one question i want to bounce off you um the area of main that you identified is important to bird populations is also the area that the n e c e c transmission lines will be bisecting what effect do you think this will have on bird populations well most of the literature says that bird most most of our birds don't see something like a transmission line as a barrier for their movement so they can move from one side to the other but having i mean obviously first and foremost it will destroy habitat secondly you have um you have fragmented the habitat so as i mentioned some unknown quite a few of our forest bird species are what we call forest interior birds so they don't like those openings they and and often those openings are where we see more predators that will access the forest so you tend to get more that more red squirrels more blue jays more of those predators that will come in and either eat the eggs and or the chicks out of the nest so you sometimes see lower productivity even if the birds are there and they're trying to nest they may not be as successful well i think anybody else have any other questions one just came in on the chat michael yeah this this this is a bird question all right all right so yesterday morning we heard squirrels one shrieked shortly thereafter there were three mature eagles flying through a very low understory in our adjacent woodland wow three mature eagles and overhead much higher up there were two soaring are they i didn't think they migrated much and i why are we see them all summer different ages and but why three mature eagles flying through at the same time obviously looking for something and then another two sort of flying north up or soaring i was i've never seen five eagles um eagles do migrate sally's gonna correct me but they do um they're they're local birds and they're migratory birds and they're right now the adults and the young are kind of moving around looking for food resources that maybe they weren't using during the summer before they all end up either at the dump or somewhere else regular yeah where there's a regular uh ice fishing spot or or something um seeing eagles fly through the canopy i have never seen that before yeah it was it was three where they're like down low that's pretty crazy they must have been there must have been either hunting squirrels or there was something in there they were interested in yeah well they've been hanging they hang around all summer they've taken loon chicks and done terrible things in my estimation but um we've seen a lot and but this is the first time i've seen them fly that low in through the forest actually or through the woods it's not a forest so much yeah that is definitely not typical yeah um chuck didsmore just has a has a comment that i'll read another overarching issue the climate crisis needs consideration closed canopy mitigation closed canopy mitigates forest floor warming thinning of the canopy may not be in the best interest of flooding fighting climate warming recent study of multi county research published in science science so this is a comment about climate change yes so we know that older more structurally complex forests store more carbon long term and are better for the soil soil also stores a lot of carbon a lot of carbon is stored underground in addition to this the carbon that's stored above ground so i mean i wasn't suggesting that you go and then cut all these trees down just just trying to to create a more structurally complex and diverse forest over time which may because we're starting in many cases with forests that are not like that sometimes you can help boost them along the trajectory towards an older forest faster by doing a little cutting then by just leaving them alone so much of our forest in Maine is this intermediate age forest which isn't really great for the birds and other wildlife that like young forest and they're really not that great for most of our birds that have evolved in older more structurally complex forests so that's what i was trying trying to get at and we've also heard research recently that riparian areas those areas there's been research recently about those areas along waterways that are also great for carbon storage and those are places where keeping the shade over the stream is really important to protect the water temperature for our native brook trout and where the trees can fall into the stream to create different pools and riffles where the find their food and resting places and so yes all for us they're great keep them going awesome um everybody thank you so much for coming it was great thank you sally you were awesome as usual thanks like great information and it's great to know all things Maine Audubon is doing to keep the bird populations going in our state so we're really happy about that um thank you everybody for coming next um second monday of december which i think is the 14th we'll have Karen Bruder talking about tagging and tracking monarch butterflies and raising them from caterpillars so that'll be pretty cool um and she's here somewhere i don't see her but yeah and and everybody have a great night thank you so much and thank you all for being interested and for your volunteer work yep maybe you've already done or yet to come through the main master natural program i'm a huge fan of this program so i appreciate being able to be a part of it just a little part of it all right good night thank you good night