Bird Atlas shows which birds declining or thriving in state

The ravens’ croak resounds around the state. The meadowlarks’ song is mostly missing.

Bald eagles are soaring here. Ruffed grouse are having a rough time of it.

Those are some of the very preliminary conclusions from the first season of work of the Connecticut Bird Atlas — a three-year attempt to learn which birds are living in the state and which are migrating through.

The project began this year with the spring migration and intensified during the summer nesting season. Its volunteers will record overwintering birds through February 2019, then gear up for Year 2.

But the key factor for the project — getting enough volunteers to bird 601 blocks of land in the state — has worked out well.

“When we began this, we really weren’t sure,” said Chris Elphick, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. “We knew there would be some people who would volunteer, but to pull this off, we knew we’d need more than 10 or 20 or 30.”

The state’s corps of birders responded to the call. Between 600 and 700 people participated in the first year, recording bird life in about 75 percent of the 601 blocks in the state.

“The first year is always tough,” said Buzz Devine of Torrington, who coordinated volunteers in the state’s northwest corner. “But it seems like it went alright.”

“We’re as pleased as punch,” said Min Huang, a wildlife biologist at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, who is coleader of the Bird Atlas project with Elphick. “To get 700 volunteers is phenomenal.”

Judith Bachman of Danbury is one of those volunteers. Her block is 76-c, a parcel of land that includes the Danbury land around the Bear Mountain Reservation, the land around the Margerie Reservoir and Hatters Park on Candlewood Lake.

The experience — especially looking for nesting species — was instructive, she said.

“I had to learn what to look for,” she said. “I had to slow down and observe more and it was good for me.”

The Bird Atlas project will update the last edition, compiled in the 1980s. It will cost about $750,000 to complete. To learn more about it, go to www.ctbir- datlas.org.

When done, it will tell people who live here about the birds around them. But it will show how the state’s landscape has changed in the past 30 years and how that’s affected its avian life.

“It’s trying to show us how our world has changed,” Elphick said.

If Eastern meadowlarks are in decline, it’s because the state’s grassland habitat — the meadows where they can lark about — have grown back to woods or been developed. Ruffed grouse thrive in brushy, first-growth forests; most of the state’s woodland is now mature.

“Habitat is the prime thing,” Elphick said.

There are also factors we cannot control. Many of the state’s migrating songbirds winter in Central and South America, Huang of the DEEP said. If people there disturb those wintering grounds, he said, songbird populations suffer.

For all those reasons, the atlas may end up showing the diversity of bird life in the state is on the downswing.

“I think we’ll find we have fewer species than we did 30 years ago,” Huang said.

But the search continues.

Ken Elkins, education program manager at Connecticut Audubon’s Bent of the River nature center in Southbury and the Atlas’ volunteer coordinator for northern Fairfield and New Haven Counties and southern Litchfield County — said some of his most unexpected sightings were a matter of serendipity.

Stopping at one spot to look for nesting birds, he said, he noticed an eastern kingbird flying around over his head.

“Its nest was in a branch hanging right over the road,” Elkins said.

Ravens, which were almost non-existent in Connecticut, have migrated down from the north, learning the carrion here is as good as any place else.

“Raven populations have completely flip-flopped from the 1980s,” Elkins said.

Massachusetts completed its latest bird atlas in 2011. Rhode Island began work on its update in 2016 and will finish in 2020.

When Connecticut finishes its work in 2021, Huang said ornithologists and environmentalists will have a good picture of what’s happening to the landscape of southern New England.

And if some species are in decline, Huang said, the three atlases will point the way to reverse those losses.

“That’s one of the goals,” he said. “To see what’s happening and try to improve it.”