Week 1:
Audobon Center at Francis Beidler Forest

May 22, 2014

Hello to those of you who decide to read this. I will try my best to make this blog an interesting one but that shouldn’t be too hard because already after the first week, this experience has been fantastic. Its unembellished telling is enough to intrigue.

I arrived here at the Audubon Center in Francis Beidler Forest on Tuesday around 4:30 pm. Even though the drive from Chicago was about as long as the unabridged “The Hobbit” book tape (13 hours), the seemingly half mile long gravel driveway to the Center felt like the longest leg of the trip. Covered by trees reminding me of family camping trips, I finally reached the other end of the driveway and emerged to see the Audubon Center. I parked in a spot surrounded by more trees and stepped out of my car. Mike, one of the Land Managers and very experienced staff members, met me near the front of the Audubon building. He introduced himself and showed me inside where I met everyone else. Mackenzie, Ricky, and Matt were the only three that weren’t outside working on something or other. Mackenzie is the Financial Director, Ricky, who was picking through a water sample trying to find bugs to send to the University of South Carolina for them to ID, is a seasonal employee of Audubon South Carolina, and Matt (my supervisor) is the Education Manager. My first impression of this place was already gleaming! It is a small visitor center with cool employees who all love being outside and, as I would later learn, were all passionate about the wildlife in and around the forest. Mike had me follow him in my car to the house I am staying in for this 10-week internship. A good friend of Audubon South Carolina offered her house to me for absolutely no cost. An incredibly kind offer from someone I had never met. Still today, I have only ever talked to her over the phone but she is a very sweet lady that I hope I get the chance to meet in person. I moved in all my things that evening and started working with Matt and Mike the next day.

The first day I was officially doing Audubon things was Wednesday. Mike picked me up at 6:15 am and we drove to a bird study plot about 10 minutes away. For those of you who may not know, Audubon is all about bird conservation. Audubon South Carolina owns a large portion of the main swamp land in South Carolina. They started with only 3,415 acres of land protected by Audubon South Carolina and over the past 50 years, their executive director and master conservationist, Norman Brunswig has expanded that number to over 17,000 acres of protected land. I met Norm on Friday and he was one of the most personable guys I have ever met. It was easy to see how he had worked out buying or gaining easements on all the private land Audubon South Carolina now protects. But I digress, back to my first day.

This study plot that we were driving to was marked with inconspicuous flags in a grid made for conducting point counts. If you want to know all there is to know about conducting point counts you can read a guide by Paul Hamel et al. titled “A Land Manager’s Guide to Point Counts of Birds in the Southeast.” Basically, we started in one corner of the grid at one point and stood there for about one minute listening for all the birds singing in the grid. Location and species of bird was recorded on a map of the study plot. Keep in mind that this is all done by ear alone. After that is done, we moved to the next point on the grid and repeated. My ornithology class at Cornell introduced me to identifying wild birds and I was told to study and memorize bird songs before coming to Beidler Forest but this was way over my head. It was a very effective introduction to what I would be doing this summer for Audubon. It sounded to me like there were 10 or 20 birds all singing throughout the plot. Mike could hear a song and instantly ID the bird. “Acadian flycatcher,” he said while pointing in some direction. “Northern Parula,” he said while pointing somewhere else. “There’s another Acadian.” I was impressed and overwhelmed at his ability to ID birds by their song alone.

After we finished walking through the swamp and I had gotten plenty of water in my boots, I ordered some high-knee rubber muck boots, changed out of my muddy clothes, promised myself that I’d study my bird songs non-stop till bedtime, and we went back to the visitor center. There I met up with Matt who is my supervisor this summer. He is the best birder I have ever met. We’ll be driving down the road and he’ll see a flash of feathers in the sky. In a split second he has his binoculars out, stops his car, looks up, and knows what species the bird is. He leads a lot of grade school groups through their forest/swamp behind the visitor center and had one such school group that morning that I tagged along with. For me, it was a great introduction to the beautiful boardwalk built around the trees behind the visitor center. It is about 1 ¾ miles long and the swamp that it covers is a rich habitat for all kinds of birds. That is what attracts most visitors to the Audubon Center at Francis Beidler Forest.

The rest of the week was spent orientating me to the swamp, learning their canoe trail that is equally jaw-droppingly beautiful, and memorizing bird songs. I can now say that I am able to ID by ear about 20 birds commonly found in Francis Beidler Forest and that list is growing every day. My main objective here at Beidler Forest is to study the Prothonotary Warbler population. I will spend most of my time monitoring the swamp and spotting every singing male Prothonotary and hopefully finding the females too. Our goal is to find where they are nesting and where their territories lie. I will do this by monitoring the swamp every day and finding a density estimate for the boardwalk and for the canoe trail. To recognize each individual bird I will use color bands that Matt, who is certified to band Prothonotary Warblers, puts on their legs in a unique pattern. I will describe density estimates and banding in my next blog post once I get the hang of monitoring. You’ll get to hear all about the bird banding we will do next week too!