Susan Day-UW Madison Arboretum
Birding evangelist Chuck Henrikson keeps track of every bird he sees and hears; he hopes to turn others into bird lovers and habitat protectors.
It is grey and misty on a still-chilly March morning but that doesn’t stop nearly 20 people from gathering at 7:30 to go birding through the UW Arboretum. Chuck Henrikson, a retired senior lecturer from the UW Veterinary School, leads the pack.
Before leaving the parking lot, Henrikson asks people to share any special bird sightings over the last week. He has his own story to share from a trip with a fellow birder to the Buena Vista Marsh Wildlife Area in Portage County. The purpose was to see prairie chickens, but an extra special treat was in store. “We saw snowy owls — four,” says Henrikson.
“Wow!” exclaims one of the birders in the group. “Oh my gosh.”
To see one of these large, white owls that hail from the Arctic tundra is memorable, Henrikson says later. “To see four,” he adds, “is phenomenal.”
Henrikson eventually leads the group out to Longenecker Gardens. The birders throw out observations as they ramble about: dark-eyed juncos are still here; goldfinches are beginning to molt into their colors; robins are singing. “If the sun were out we’d have a lot more singing,” someone says.
The group huddles in the Pinetum — where the pine trees’ juniper berries provide tasty morsels for birds — looking for the rare Townsend’s Solitaire. Henrikson first spotted the bird, which is common in Western states, on Dec. 12. Gray with distinctive white eye rings, these birds like to perch up high, so people are scanning the treetops with their binoculars, hoping for a sighting; today, the bird is a no-show.
That Dec. 12 sighting is recorded as “TOSO” in the small book Henrikson carries whenever he is out and about. Each page is dated, with location and time of outing noted. Henrikson records every bird he sees and hears.
But he doesn’t stop there. He and many of the people he birds with submit their sightings to eBird, an international digital data collection site managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It is this collection and transition of data that transforms Henrikson from a birdwatcher to citizen scientist.
“eBird is one of the biggest citizen science programs in the whole world,” says Karen Oberhauser, director of the Arboretum, who joined the morning bird walk. “They get millions of data entries, so because there are so many data entries the data are just incredibly valuable. There have been hundreds of publications based on eBird data.”
Oberhauser says eBird data helps scientists track such things as the movement of birds into different kinds of habitat, climate change and the movement of species into new territories.
“So the data that comes from the Arboretum and from Chuck’s walks over the years helps us at the Arb understand what’s going on here and it helps the local community know where to go to look for birds. But it can also be used in big meta analyses to help us understand so many different impacts of environmental change.”
Oberhauser is one of the pioneers in the area of citizen science. After earning a doctorate in animal behavior, she taught conservation at the University of Minnesota and turned her efforts toward protecting monarch butterflies, which have suffered from the loss of habitat. She enlisted volunteers from across the country and Canada to help report observations about the butterflies.
Bryce Richter-UW Madison
Susan Carpenter, native plant gardener at the Arb, talks to volunteers about how to survey and monitor bees.
At the Arboretum since October, Oberhauser is eager to expand the citizen science work at the facility. She is working with staffers Susan Carpenter, Wisconsin native plant gardener, and Brad Herrick, ecologist, to create training modules for citizen science projects. Being developed with input from the state Department of Natural Resources, these educational packages will include a video with an overview of the citizen science project and monitoring instructions needed for participation, says Oberhauser. There will also be an instructor kit for teaching people how to train others to do the project.
These modules will be useful to the DNR and other Wisconsin groups that work with citizen scientists, says Oberhauser. “The DNR has strong monitoring programs, but they don’t always have resources to train volunteers.”
The Arboretum is also becoming a Snapshot Wisconsin site, with two cameras to track trail activity to learn about animal behavior. There is also a project to monitor dragonflies at the Arb’s ponds and wetlands. “Dragonflies are well known indicators of water quality,” says Oberhauser. “The presence of dragonfly nymphs can indicate high quality water.” Budding citizen scientists can attend a workshop on May 19 led by Herrick and UW System educator Robert Bohanan to learn to “identify many common dragonfly species, conduct surveys, and record and submit data.”
Ongoing projects include the monitoring of the rare and endangered rusty patched bumble bee, and 11 other bumble bee species, jumping worms and monarch butterflies. Oberhauser and Herrick also recently met with the Stream Monitoring Alliance to set up stream monitoring sites at the Arb, and she is meeting soon with a group about monitoring deer browse, the leaves, twigs and buds of woody plants consumed by deer.
The goal of the deer browse project is to “assess the degree to which deer are affecting vegetation” and to monitor the local deer population, says Oberhauser.
After retiring from the UW in 2009, Henrikson trained to become a volunteer steward at the Arb. He continues that work, checking the trails for fallen debris and helping people find their way. But he soon added birding to his trail walks and, well, one thing led to another. He started recording his sightings at the Arb and, in 2010, began contributing to eBird. It’s a win-win, he says.
“They keep track of all my data for free and it’s always accessible to me.” And, as a citizen scientist, he gets to “contribute in a small way to the data the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is collecting about birds from all over the world.”
Henrikson finds birding challenging and fascinating with the anticipatory pleasure of a treasure hunt. He gets to spend time in the outdoors and share his love of nature and birds with others. “My goal is to convert as many as I can into bird lovers so that they will, in turn, want to save habitats for the birds, which will, in the long run, save the planet for all of us.”
This story is part of our Arboretum Issue. Read the rest of our Arb coverage.
