Barn Owls and Breeding Birds

If you build it, they will come. Barn Owls, thought to be gone from Vermont some years ago, are here. And Vermont’s own WCAX-TV is on the story, a tribute to a biology teacher, some nest boxes and enterprising kids.

Meanwhile, from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, is all the news that’s fit to print on the breeding birds of Vermont. VCE has put online the results of the Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas.

“For five years, citizen scientists scoured fields, traversed forests, and endured black flies, mosquitos, and broken ankles to collect the more than 30,000 observations that comprise the Atlas database, ” VCE reports in a news release “Their hard work has been compiled, analyzed, summarized, and interpreted to document changes in the state’s bird distributions since the first Atlas.”

Complete with detailed accounts for each species, summaries of results, distribution maps, and tables, the Atlas website will be a hallmark reference for anyone needing accessible information on the status of birds that breed in Vermont.

A full-color hard cover Atlas book is now in production and scheduled for release in early 2013. (I wrote the section on the history of avian conservation in Vermont.) Complete with maps, data tables, full-text species accounts, photos, and interpretive chapters, the publication will serve as a rich, attractive, and user-friendly resource for birders, natural resource managers, and the conservation-interested public.