The Game Commissioners this week gave approval to a $100,000 federal State Wildlife Grant to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in support of the Second Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas analysis project.

“After six years and more than 92,000 hours of fieldwork, Pennsylvania birders have completed the most detailed and comprehensive survey of breeding bird distribution and abundance ever completed in the Commonwealth,” said Dan Brauning, Game Commission Non-Game Division chief and editor of the First Breeding Bird Atlas from the 1980s. “This data updates the status of endangered and threatened birds and documents changes of all the state’s more than 190 breeding birds since the first atlas.”

The fieldwork for this project was funded predominantly by previously approved federal SWG grants.

Started in 2000, the Second Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas was the most extensive survey of the state’s nesting birds ever attempted. The grid-based survey tracked the changes that have occurred in bird populations since the first atlas was completed in 1989. Since that time, eagles, ospreys and peregrine falcons have expanded their breeding numbers substantially. The project also sought to chart whether the long-term declines of many songbirds reported in the first atlas continue.

“Although it follows and largely replicates the first atlas, conducted in Pennsylvania from 1983 to 1989, the second atlas also provides new levels of understanding for the state’s bird populations that will help to ensure their conservation now and in the future,” Brauning said. “It has been supported largely with federal State Wildlife Grant funds awarded through the Game Commission, and organized and coordinated by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History through offices at the museum’s Powdermill Nature Reserve.”

The Breeding Bird Atlas, when published, will show changes in the occurrence and distribution of the state’s nesting wild birds and game birds, and promises to provide much additional information about the state’s breeding birds, including their habitat preferences and abundance. The use of technologies, such as global positioning satellites and the internet – unavailable when data for the first Atlas was collected –improved this survey.

For more information, visit the Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas webpage.