The Pennsylvania Game Commission and Carnegie Museum of Natural History are looking for both casual and avid birdwatchers to help monitor nesting wild birds in the 2nd Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas.

The 2nd Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas is the most extensive survey of the state’s nesting birds ever attempted. Started this spring, the grid-based survey will continue for the next five years and aims to track the changes that have occurred in bird populations since the first atlas was completed. Since that time, eagles, ospreys and peregrine falcons have expanded their breeding numbers substantially. Also of interest will be charting whether the long-term declines of many of songbirds reported in the first atlas continues.

Although it follows and largely replicates the first atlas, which was conducted in Pennsylvania from 1983 to 1989, the second atlas project will provide new levels of understanding for the state’s bird populations that will help to ensure their conservation now and in the future. It is funded largely with federal State Wildlife Grant monies through the Game Commission and organized and coordinated by Carnegie Museum of Natural History through offices at the museum’s Powdermill Nature Reserve.

The original Atlas was done with help from more than 2,000 volunteers. There are more than 4,900 blocks to cover Pennsylvania’s about 45,000 square miles, but it quickly becomes apparent that more volunteer help is critically needed.

Field work for the Atlas began in January by a core group of knowledgeable and hard-working regional coordinators who are responsible for recruiting and organizing volunteer birdwatchers in each of Atlas’ 57 rectangular regions across the state. Most coordinators have 75 to 100 survey blocks that must be monitored by volunteer birdwatchers over the next five years.

When it’s finished in 2008, the second Atlas will show changes in the occurrence and distribution of the state’s nearly 200 species of nesting birds, and promises to provide much additional information about the state’s breeding birds.

The use of technologies, such as global positioning satellites and geographic information systems –unavailable when data for the first Atlas was collected – are expected to improve the survey.

But success in getting to the finish line, and the quantity and quality of data collected, will be directly influenced by the number of volunteers who participate, especially covering blocks in rural Pennsylvania.

To date, about 750 volunteers have registered and begun helping in more than 1,400 blocks in the second Atlas survey.

Additional funding for the Atlas has been provided by the Wild Resource Conservation Fund, and in-kind and other assistance is being provided by state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ bureaus of Forestry and State Parks, Pennsylvania Audubon, Pennsylvania Society for Ornithology, Penn State Cooperative Wetlands Center, Penn State Institutes of the Environment, Penn State School of Forest Resources, Powdermill Nature Reserve and Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

Individuals interested in volunteering for Atlas survey work are asked to register on the Breeding Bird Atlas Website or call Atlas project coordinators at 724-593-6022.

7/30/2004