preview

Migratory Land Birds Response To The Hurricane Devastation

Decent Essays
Open Document

Most species are flexible in their foraging strategies and in their abilities to forage and find food in different locations because they must adapt to changing landscapes. Typically, if a migrant is in a stopover site that doesn’t have adequate resources, it will move to a stopover site that has better resources. This will be hard at the western part of the Gulf for them to do. It’s been 2 months since the hurricane hit and it’s difficult to assess how migratory land birds stopping over in the Gulf Coast have responded to the hurricane’s devastation. The species that specialize by foraging in the leaf litter of the forest floor, are at a disadvantage regarding the large area that has been flooded. Millions of trees were toppled in the …show more content…

Birds have some spatial awareness and while these storms may destroy nesting grounds and make water rise, that’s not always a bad thing. Habitat selection has become a prominent concept in ecology, but has received less attention in coastal ecology. Coastal marshes are their specific types. The categories for separation are vegetation composition, water-level management, and individual species habitat. One study they investigated wetland bird habitat selection from 2009 to 2011. The birds surveyed were the marsh birds and shorebirds, and wading birds in the coastal marshes of Louisiana and Texas. (Weller n.d.)
Within each year, six repeated surveys of wintering habits, resident, migration and breeding results revealed that the most important factor was water depth. They started to see a pattern that correlated birds with water depth. The strongest indicator was the abundance of these birds in waters that had risen more than a few feet. This rise in the depth led to fresh marsh and permanently impounded water, which meant more fish and an abundance of resources. (Weller n.d.) Their numbers also increased in intermediate marsh because of the increase in shallows. The effects suggest that the timing of drawdowns, a time when the water recedes slightly and when it rises after a hurricane is a pinnacle opportunity that greatly affects wetland bird abundance. (Renee 2016) In Texas, the flooding created a resource abundant habitat for

Get Access