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Beef & Birds
June 22, 2020 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm MDT
A Conversation with Grady and Tammy
Join us for a special virtual program featuring Grady Grissom, owner of Rancho Largo Custom Beef and 2017 Leopold Conservation Award Winner, and Tammy VerCauteren, Executive Director at Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. They’ll share their stories on how their paths crossed, perspectives about cattle ranching and bird conservation on private lands and the future of grasslands. We’ll also explore how birds serve as indicators of healthy, productive landscapes and the importance of grazing for grassland bird conservation. Following the presentation, Tammy and Grady will take your questions!
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Species monitoring is a vital tool for conservation biology. Monitoring provides baseline information that is required for effective design and evaluation of conservation policies and management strategies. Monitoring studies are particularly important for declining species such as the Black Swift. Black Swifts have experienced range-wide population declines in the US and Canada, but the mechanisms underlying population declines are poorly understood. Our proposed monitoring network will provide baseline sampling to precisely estimate abundance, regional population size, and population trend data through time to provide valuable information for this species’ road to recovery.
Climate Resilience in Sagebrush Rangelands
Marcella Tarantino | Land Stewardship, Stewardship | No CommentsDrought has been a consistent reality across the Western Slope of Colorado and the arid west for decades. This complex ecological force creates a wide variety of issues for people, habitat, and wildlife. Stewardship biologists at Bird Conservancy work with landowners to increase climate resilience in the face of drought, by implementing a variety of habitat restoration techniques that can better retain moisture on the landscape and promote healthy, native ecosystems. Improving resilience on sagebrush rangelands is difficult due to the arid nature of these environments, but wet meadow restoration and invasive species management for cheatgrass and invasive conifers can be used to increase climate resilience.
Modern Wildfires III: Flourishing Forests
David McNitt | Land Stewardship, Stewardship | No CommentsFire is a fact of life in the American West, of that you can be sure. Our forests have long been shaped by fire, and efforts to prevent it have significantly changed forests and often backfired —making wildfires worse. Today, we are correcting course by using a process called forest restoration which uses land management tools to transition forests back to near historic conditions to make forests more resilient to natural disturbances, such as fire, while also providing benefits to people and wildlife.
Modern Wildfires: The Effects on Wildlife and Beyond
David McNitt | Land Stewardship, Science | No CommentsHigh-severity fires have occurred for millennia, but historically were isolated to cool, moist forests that burned infrequently. Due to the practice of fire suppression that has become common in modern times, today’s fires are fed by over a century’s worth of accumulated fuel. Further, a warming, drying climate in the American West has dried the fuel, and expanding human development and recreation have increased ignition sources – the proverbial match in the tinderbox. These factors allow high-severity fires to burn indiscriminately across forest types. Projections vary, but all agree that the number of acres burned by these fires that are extreme in both size and intensity – now known as megafires – will increase in coming decades. Let’s take a look at what these modern wildfires mean for wildlife, and birds in particular.