Ptarmigan in a Changing World
Ptarmigan Pioneers: Navigating Arctic Shifts in a Changing Landscape
Working through the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, researcher Brett Bailey is working to quantify habitat quality in communities of Neotropical migrant birds across a landscape dominated by small coffee farms and forest fragments. His study utilizes a three tiered approach towards collecting data, incorporating repeated point counts, telemetry, and mist netting. A species of high concern, the Wood Thrush, occurs at approximately 80% of the coffee sites and represents an important target species for this study. The Wood Thrush is one of many migratory songbirds that spend their winters foraging in the tropical forests of central America. When large sections of forest are cleared to make way for traditional coffee plantations, the Wood Thrush may lose critical habitat. Shade-grown coffee plantations preserve this potentially vital habitat, as researcher Brett Bailey explains in this short documentary.
Whilst potentially benefiting from shrub expansion, ptarmigan play an active role in altering the architecture and productivity of arctic shrubs through heavily browsing them. A trophic feedback loop may result, where selective browsing by ptarmigan curtails the expansion of preferred willows, while indirectly enhancing the expansion of other, competing shrubs. For Katie Christie’s Ph.D. research, she investigates the spatial extent and magnitude of browsing by ptarmigan in the arctic, and their influence on the architecture and productivity of arctic willows. I also conduct aerial surveys over a mosaic of riparian and upland habitat types to quantify the spring distribution and habitat associations of ptarmigan in northeastern Alaska. In the high arctic of North America, climate change is already having dramatic effects on landscapes and herbivores. Ptarmigan may serve as an ecosystem “indicator” species, providing a glimpse at what life may look like in a changing arctic world.