Sap and Songbirds: Collaborative Research Evaluates Audubon’s Bird-Friendly Maple Program
by Liza Morse
Spring in Vermont often arrives in fits and starts before finally settling into a season that any of us might fully call spring. With an unseasonably warm winter behind us, this spring has decided to play its normal psychological games with us for yet another year. But while the rest of us may be growing anxious for the migrant birds to arrive or for the days of shoveling to be behind us, no one experiences the rollercoaster ride of Vermont spring quite like our sugarmakers. Vermont is the largest producer of maple syrup and other maple products in the United States, which means sugarmakers have been busy all across the state fixing lines and boiling sap to make our endemic North American treat! As the season winds down and syrup takes on a funky “buddy” flavor signaling the impending arrival of budburst, our maple forests become the production site of something more avian but every bit as sweet!
Vermont is situated in the Northern Forest ecosystem, which provides some of the highest-quality breeding bird habitat in North America, supporting over 80 species of forest songbird. Understanding how we can manage our forests for both birds and maple has been a core goal of my graduate research at the University of Vermont and the subject of a research partnership with Audubon Vermont and The Vermont Center for Ecostudies. This partnership aimed to evaluate the efficacy of Audubon’s Bird-Friendly Maple program. Our work led to the publication of a report in April of 2023 and will be followed by further research publications in collaboration with UVM. As you get ready to go look at birds this spring (perhaps in a sugarbush!), I hope you will enjoy reading a little bit about birds and how we can manage our forests with them in mind.
Click here to read the report: “Sugarbush Management Impacts on Forest Structure and Bird Communities in Vermont.”