This flock of volunteers has birds in mind
Mass Audubon project relies on 'citizen scientists'
When Sarah McKay gets home from her days in second grade, she pours seed into her family's backyard bird feeders in Newton and fills the shallow bird bath with clean water. And always, she keeps an eye out for the orange flash of a Baltimore oriole.
Last year, she saw two - one in Weston and another in a Newton park. This spring, an oriole landed on her bird bath.
"The first time I saw an oriole, I was like, 'I really like this bird,' " she said. "I just try to watch for orioles a lot."
Whenever she spots an oriole, Sarah, who is 7, sends an online report about where and when she saw the bird. She is one of a new corps of citizens who are helping the Massachusetts Audubon Society track the bird, whose numbers have been declining. Between mid-May and the end of July last year, 710 "citizen scientists" - from elementary school students to retirees on the golf course - reported 3,374 oriole sightings around the state.
While Mass Audubon's Oriole Project may seem simple, its goals are sophisticated: to add the tallies of volunteer bird watchers to the official scientific counts, but also to draw in citizens to the plight of the birds. The oriole survey was the pilot project in Mass Audubon's Birds to Watch conservation effort, which has expanded to include whip-poor-wills, and has American kestrels next on the list.
"The idea is that conservation efforts have often focused on the rarest of the rare, endangered species," said Christopher Leahy, the Gerard A. Bertrand Chair of Natural History and Field Ornithology at Mass Audubon. "The problem is when birds get so rare that they're on the endangered species list, they get very hard to save. Very hard to save and very expensive to save."
Orioles were a logical place to start the Birds to Watch project. The brilliant colors and intricate hanging nests of orioles, often attracted to backyards by orange slices, make them a popular bird to watch. They're still common enough that they're accessible to many bird watchers. But orioles are in trouble, with their numbers dropping off slowly but steadily. In Massachusetts in recent years, orioles have declined about 3 percent a year, Leahy said.
"The statistics show that Baltimore orioles are declining quite significantly and have been for the last 30 years or so," he said.
Scientists don't know exactly why orioles seem to be declining but their theories include the destruction of the orioles' habitat, pesticides, a growing number of predators, and an increase in parasites that live in the birds' nests.
Tina Phillips, team leader for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's NestWatch program, says citizen scientist programs have become more common in the last decade as technology has evolved to allow the collection of large amounts of data over the Internet. Information collected by volunteers may not be as detailed as data gathered by researchers, but the scale is vast. Phillips studies bird nests, and while a single researcher might collect data on 1,000 nests over 20 years, volunteers in her project can collect data on 10,000 nests in a single year. Scientific projects that draw in volunteers can also serve a broader purpose, she said.
"By simply telling people, 'Orioles are declining, orioles are declining, orioles are declining,' that may or may not get them to change their behavior," Phillips said. "But if you can get them to go out and look for orioles, collect data on orioles, get them outside, your chances are better then you will get them to change their understanding, appreciation or even their behavior."
There are limits to citizen science projects, Phillips said. Surveys conducted by volunteers, for instance, usually don't gather information on individual birds, since that would require placing a band on the bird's leg, a complicated undertaking for amateurs.
The Oriole Project began five years ago, and after this reporting season ends July 31, scientists at Mass Audubon will start analyzing the data. Most of the information available about orioles traditionally has been drawn from annual surveys conducted by the US Geological Survey and the Canadian Wildlife Service.
"We'll have created a kind of army of oriole watchers out there," Leahy said. "They become protective of their orioles. It's kind of an additional level of environmental awareness."
Orioles usually arrive in Massachusetts in early May and are particularly visible now, during mating season. They like to build nests in tall deciduous trees, like elms, maples, sycamores and cottonwoods, often on the edge of a clearing, like a golf course. In early August, the birds start flying south for the winter.
"Whether it's a 7-year-old girl or these guys on the golf course, they send us a report," Leahy said. "The demographics of this are very broad. It creates a human record of the landscape, not just a scientific record."
Fewer volunteers have signed up to report whip-poor-wills; tracking the species requires driving during a full moon and stopping every tenth of a mile to listen for their distinctive calls. In Massachusetts, whip-poor-wills are still common in pine-oak barrens on the South Shore, Cape Cod and the Islands, but declining elsewhere around the state. Mass Audubon started the Whip-poor-will Project two years ago.
"There's only so many crazy people willing to go out when the moon is full and look for birds," Leahy said.
Jeffrey Gifford, who lives in Brookline, is another of the Mass Audubon oriole trackers. He doesn't consider himself a serious bird watcher, but he spends a lot of time outdoors. Gifford, executive officer of the state Department of Environmental Affairs, last year reported seeing a handful of orioles, including one in an unlikely spot: downtown Boston.
"I saw one in the Public Garden," he said. "I said I've been walking here for 20 years and this is the first time I've ever seen one in the Public Garden."
Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com. 