Connecticut Bird Atlas Kick-Off
Tuesday, December 12
6:30 p.m.
Co-hosted with and at Great Hollow Nature Preserve & Ecological Research Center.
Limited to 25 registered individuals.
Free for all attendees.
The state birding community will be called on to conduct surveys as volunteers for the Connecticut Bird Atlas Project, which gets underway in 2018. The project will focus on all birds that breed, winter or migrate in Connecticut. The Bird Atlas project is also the subject on our upcoming Connecticut State of the Birds report, to be released on December 1.The goals of the project are to provide information on bird habitats that can then be used to guide conservation and development decisions, and to contribute meaningful data for the state’s Wildlife Action Plan.
The scope of the atlas is to understand breeding bird distribution and abundance; to document changes since the last atlas in the mid 1980s; to understand wintering distribution of the birds in the state; to identify stopover habitat during migrations; to establish predictive relationships where species occur on the landscape; and to use the results and data to create an interactive website.
The last atlas was published in 1994, based on data collected after years of surveys from 1982 to 1986. This effort was supported by many NHBC members. We hope the members can come out again to support the new effort.
Dr. Min Huang
Min Huang has been a wildlife biologist for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection for the past 16 years and heads the Migratory Bird Program. He is also an adjunct research scientist with the University of Connecticut. He has worked as a wildlife biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission where he managed the Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area, working primarily with deer and various endangered species such as the Florida grasshopper sparrow, red-cockaded woodpecker, Florida scrub jay, and whooping crane. He also spent 5 years working for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife as a District Biologist, where he primarily worked with deer, elk, mountain goats and endangered species such as the spotted owl and marbled murrelet. Other than the current Atlas project, he is involved with studies assessing American kestrel survival, American woodcock habitat use and survival in response to management, clapper rail survival and nesting success, and the development of a multi-stock decision framework for the harvest management of waterfowl in the Atlantic Flyway.
To register, click here
