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Private Backyards as Resources for Avian Conservation
Mackenzie Guest, Carly Ziter, Barbara Frei
Birds are a key taxa in every ecosystem, including cities, where many complete all stages of their life history, and provide many benefits to human residents. Birds control pest species, disperse seeds, and are shown to improve residents’ mental health. While their presence is invaluable in cities, the urban landscape can pose serious challenges to their survival, most notably through window collisions and predation from domestic cats. However, the heterogeneous nature of cities can provide novel habitats that are high quality to birds. Studies investigating urban birds generally focus on differences between urban-rural populations, or their status in publicly managed green spaces such as parks, yet, residential yards can represent 50% of the urban forest. My thesis aims to investigate the potential of privately owned residential yards as resources for avian conservation. I am asking how are birds using residential yards compared to publicly managed street right-of-way (ROW) trees? I hypothesize that birds will display different behaviours in yards compared to street trees, since private yards have been found to have more diverse vegetation. We conducted surveys in yards (n = 20) and street segments (n = 20) recording bird species, their behaviour and the plant species they were interacting with. We observed 31 bird species spanning 20 families. Preliminary results show that birds equally use private yards and public ROWs, suggesting the urban forest as a whole can be a resource for avian conservation. These results can help city managers and homeowners make landscaping choices that benefit birds.
