S.6 Ep.8: Bird's Eye View

Sometimes, a simple “silvicultural tweak” can make a big difference in achieving diverse forest management goals. The real challenge lies in knowing when—and how—to make those adjustments. To help with that, several states have created Forestry for the Birds guidebooks, offering practical strategies to enhance forest habitat for birds. In this episode of SilviCast, we’re joined by Christian Nelson, Lake States Coordinator for the Forest Stewards Guild, to discuss the newly released Forestry for Minnesota Birds guidebook and how it can support better habitat outcomes across the region.

Photo Credit: Mark Schocken

To earn CEU/CFE credits, learn more, or interact with SilviCast, visit the uwsp.edu/SilviCast.

Transcript

[Greg Edge]

Welcome to Silvicast, the podcast about all things silviculture. My name is Greg Edge.

[Brad Hutnik]

And I'm Brad Hutnick.

[Greg Edge]

And we are both silviculturists with the Wisconsin DNR Division of Forestry and your host for today's show.

[Brad Hutnik]

Young Master Edge. 

[Greg Edge]

Yes. Good morning.

[Brad Hutnik]

I'm afraid to ask, because you are really engrossed in your phone. Did you start that OnlyFans site that we were talking about? 

[Greg Edge] 

Nothing devious going on here.

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. Well, what are you up to? 

[Greg Edge]

Well, you know how much I like my Merlin Bird app, not to give a promotion here, but I really do like Cornell's Merlin Bird app.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yep. 

[Greg Edge]

So I'm just looking at all the bird songs that I recorded this morning on my walk. With Watson. It's pretty cool. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, cool. So what did you hear?

[Greg Edge]

Well, why don't we do this like we usually like to do it, Brad, and let's do a quiz. I'm going to quiz you on some of the birds I heard, and we'll see what your ornithology knowledge is like. 

[Brad Hutnik]

I'm willing to play along.

[Greg Edge]

Okay. We're going to start really, really easy. We'll give you a softball. So listen to this.

*goose noise*

[Greg Edge]

Just take your time. I know it's difficult. 

[Brad Hutnik]

You know, I'm kind of offended, Greg. Like maybe we should just review the alphabet too, you know, like just make sure I know that. So that sounds like…

[Greg Edge]

Well, I don't know what your starting point is. 

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. So I guess maybe we're putting brackets on my knowledge of birds, but that sounds like a Canada goose. 

[Greg Edge]

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

[Brad Hutnik]

All right.

[Greg Edge]

Ding, ding, ding. Okay. Yeah. We're going to ratchet it up a notch then in difficulty and see where you go with this.

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. Okay. 

[Greg Edge]

Again, take your time. Listen carefully. 

*blue winged warbler sound*

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. Okay. So that is a harder one and we're probably effectively bracketing what I know about these things. So Greg, that was a piggimee poop sparrow. Which is only found in certain parts of Wisconsin, right around Shantytown. There's a huge population of those.

[Greg Edge]

I thought, yeah, that must be coming from your hometown.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. Well, it's, if you, if you don't know it, at least say it authoritatively so that someone might believe it.

[Greg Edge]

Ahh okay. 

[Brad Hutnik]

But I don't know. 

[Greg Edge]

That's a big *harsh incorrect buzzer gameshow sound*.  The bee buzz sound is a blue winged warbler. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Okay. 

[Greg Edge]

In fact, I believe we heard that.

[Brad Hutnik]

Just the other day.

[Greg Edge]

When we were out, uh, maybe working at the past site. 

[Brad Hutnik]

I don't know if, did you see that woodcock that was flying down the trail in front of us there too? Which was kind of cool.

[Greg Edge]

No, I missed a woodcock. I was going to play a woodcock sound for you, but I didn't get to that one. But I have one more. I have one more today. Again, bracketing your ornithology knowledge. 

*pterodactyl dinosaur sound*

[Brad Hutnik]

Okay. So, so are you, are you butchering this bird or is it, are you torturing a bird in this one? Cause that's, that's kind of sad, Greg. I, I didn't know you'd even play that for us or maybe record it even. That's the hard part. Uh, you know what I'm going to say? I have not a clue what that would be.

[Greg Edge]

Okay. That one I'll give you. I was just pulling your leg there. That was a pterodactyl. 

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. Well, I'm glad not to know that one then. 

[Greg Edge]

Yeah. Not even a bird, is it or?

[Brad Hutnik]

No, it's a, it's like a pre bird, you know, like before we had birds, we had flying dinosaurs 

[Greg Edge]

Anyway, that was really interesting I'm sure you found. And I think you better brush up a little bit on your bird songs because today on Silvicast, Brad, we're going to be talking birds. We're going to actually be talking forestry for the birds to be exact because just in a little bit here, we're meeting with Christian Nelson, the Lake States coordinator for the Forest Stewards Guild to talk about the new forestry for Minnesota birds guidebook, which Christian was instrumental in helping develop. And we're going to learn a little bit about how we can use silvicultural practices to enhance habitat for important bird species.

[Brad Hutnik]

Perfect. And I, I think the audience will really enjoy talking to Christian. I know I always do.

[Greg Edge]

So let's get on with it. 

[Brad Hutnik]

This season of Silvicast is brought to you by the Nelson Paint Company, McCoy Construction and Forestry, and the Family Forest Carbon Program. You make the Silvicast world go round. So thank you. 

Christian Nelson, welcome to Silvicast. For those in our audience who may not be familiar with you or the work you do, tell us a little bit about where you live and what you've been doing.

[Christian Nelson]

Sure. Thanks for having me, Brad and Greg. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to this conversation. My name is Christian Nelson. I'm with the Forest Stewards Guild.

It's a national nonprofit, environmental advocacy and ecological forestry advocacy group based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It's got about 35, roughly full-time employees and a number of seasonal employees. We have staff in the Pacific Northwest, a big cohort in the Southwest around New Mexico and the headquarters, another group in the South and another group in the Northeast.

And then I'm with two other people in the Lake States. So I'm, I'm in Minnesota, Northern Minnesota, near Duluth. The director for the Lake States is down in Mankato and we have staff memory.

Madison prior to being with the Forest Stewards Guild, I was with the Fond du Lac band of Lake Superior Chippewa as a forester for about 18 years. So altogether I've been in forestry, primarily in the Lake States, Minnesota and Wisconsin, both for about 25 years.

[Greg Edge]

And truth be told you two know each other.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. And so we attended the National Advanced Silviculture Program together. I remember too, like just Christian, we had really good people in that class, you know, just being able to see people from different parts of the country or talk to them about their experience.

That was a real hoot.

[Christian Nelson]

It was such a privilege to have that opportunity to go through that. I mean, it's 12 weeks, you know, paid it's all over the country. It's airfare.

It's staying in hotels. It's weeks at a time in Oregon and Flagstaff in Knoxville, Tennessee and Michigan, I think 38 other people roughly from the Forest Service and the BLM and different state agencies, it was such a great opportunity to just travel around and see silviculture across the US, see how different agencies do it, see how different people approach it. That was such a great eyeopening experience and just really sort of poured fertilizer, you could say, on my enthusiasm for forestry, I guess.

Yeah. You know, it's just one of those things where it's just a booster, basically.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yep.

[Greg Edge]

It's a great program.

[Brad Hutnik]

And Christian, I'll always remember you and I sitting at dinner at an airport and then hearing something like last call, next thing you know, we are, we are headed down the, through the airport. And I remember thinking, oh, my stomach's not going to like this, but we made it. So.

[Christian Nelson]

That was the most Hollywood last second get on a flight moment I've ever had. We're literally sprinting through the airport while our names are being called over the PA system. Yeah.

That was some delinquency. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Good times. Yeah, yeah.

[Greg Edge]

I'm sure you two could sit and reminisce about other events at NASP, but we did get together with you, Christian, today because you were involved in a project. I'm sure you're involved in lots of different projects, but you were involved as a primary author in the creation of the Forestry for Minnesota Birds guidebook that got bred in my attention. We keep close tabs on that and this one's right next door to us.

And we just thought this was gonna be a really good opportunity to talk about that guidebook and kind of silviculture and birds and where those two intersect. Can you say a little bit about the creation of that? You know, who was involved?

Did it just recently come out?

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah, it just came out and we're really proud of it. We've got hard copies available. We've got digital copies on the Forest Stewards Guild's Forestry for the Birds website.

I'm sure the show notes will have links to that. Yep. I was actually hired by the Forest Stewards Guild roughly two years ago, specifically to help work on this project.

Funding that was actually hired me came through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, went into the Upper Mississippi Great Lakes Joint Venture, which is kind of a, it's hard to explain, but it's kind of underneath the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, I believe. And they are regional bird advocacy group, essentially, government agency. So I think what led to the whole thing was, I'll just say some of the background that some of these statistics are out there and I'm sure your audience is foresters and you've seen these statistics, but roughly one in four birds have sort of disappeared off the North American continent since the seventies in terms of total population.

Roughly a billion birds or so fewer on any given day in the United States in the summer compared to 30 or 40 years ago. So there's been a massive decline in bird populations for all kinds of reasons. I'm sure we'll get to what some of these issues are that are facing birds that are not just forestry.

But what we wanted to do was do what we can here at home on the breeding territory, not necessarily worry about what's happening south of Minnesota's border or elsewhere in the U.S. or in South America or Central America or any of the other things that are completely out of our hands, essentially. What can we do at home to promote quality bird habitat in forests, especially in Minnesota's forests? How can we basically promote that?

Get that out there and implement what are essentially, I listened to your previous podcast with Jeff Larkin and Dan, was it Hagenstaller? 

[Greg Edge]

Yep.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah.

[Greg Edge]

Yep. Yep. Jeff and Dan.

[Christian Nelson]

Professor. 

[Greg Edge]

And a forester. 

[Christian Nelson]

At Indiana University. They had an interesting comment that states are really good at making BMPs, essentially publications for bird habitat. Essentially. I think when I was listening to that podcast, I was thinking that's, that's a fair assessment for what we've done.

We've basically made a guidebook that sort of lays down some principles and some practices that will basically result in higher quality forest songbird habitat than if it's not done all within the context of forestry in Minnesota. A little off track here, but you mentioned who all was involved in this and kind of what started it. So, so the need is, you know, the, definitely the recognition that birds are, are having problems and they're declining and they're, and they're still declining.

Many birds are. Not all birds, but many birds are still declining. Several states starting in about roughly 2008, I think Vermont in partnership with, I believe Audubon was one of the first states to actually come up with a forestry for the birds publication and program. Cause really what we're talking about here is more than just the guidebook.

That's kind of the, the showy flashy thing, but the whole program sort of encompasses not only just the guidebook, but also education outreach, things like this podcast, webinars, workshops, ways to basically get, get the word out there, get people in the field and thinking about this. So there's several states have guidebooks already, Minnesota didn't. And so in about 2018, Mike Lynch, the Lake States director and a forest doer guild member co-hosted a silvicultural forestry for the birds workshop.

And I think 2018 with Aitkin County forestry, which is in central Minnesota. Aitkin County forestry has kind of a reputation for being kind of cutting edge pioneers and innovative. Oh yeah.

That was very well received. There was a lot of interest from the, the people that had attended that mostly Minnesota foresters and consulting foresters and wildlife folks and things like that, and it was like, Hey, we, we really should do something like that here in Minnesota. Other states are doing it.

We can kind of take a look at what they're doing, sort of capitalize on it. We need some funding and we need to hire someone that can basically work on this because it's not, it's too big of a task for us to sort of just add on to our, our normal daily responsibilities. So Mike Lynch with Alexis Grindy, who works with the university of Minnesota's natural resource research Institute, avian ecology lab, big in the bird world here in Northern Minnesota, really in the Lake States and wildlife world.

They went after some funding and were unsuccessful a few times. And then finally we ended up with the funding from the great lakes joint venture, which ended up getting me hired. And so while this was all in the works, Peter Deaser with American bird conservancy based in Northwest Minnesota and Peg Robertson, Robertson now retired us forest service forester got together and started pulling together a really diverse team, a steering committee and sort of a planning committee to sort of help generate the content, decide who we're going to address, how we're going to address it, what we're going to put in this thing, what it might look like. And to basically just start getting the team together to assemble the, not only the expertise that we're going to need in forestry and the bird world.

But we also wanted buy-in from a number of different entities and agencies. So we had people from the U S forest service, Minnesota DNR, county forestry, non-governmental agencies and landowner agencies, Minnesota forest industries, how we set up, had some tribal staff on our committees, Minnesota forest resource council, university of Minnesota, a couple of different areas there, wildlife chapter. So just a ton of people from all across the state, Audubon all across the state, all basically lending expert opinion, thoughts, review, editing, generating content, and just overall, I might be listed as the lead author and I'm kind of the person that gets to be the head of the voice and sometimes the face for some of these webinars and podcasts, but ultimately I'm just one person on a big team.

[Greg Edge]

I think Christian at the heart of forestry for the birds is this intersection, obviously between forestry and silviculture and how to make better bird habitat. I liked in the guidebook, it had a statement and it just said bird presence and abundance reflect overall forest health. So why are birds good indicators of forest health?

Like how does that help us keep healthy forest ecosystems?

[Christian Nelson]

I think that maybe any given bird itself maybe doesn't act as a good indicator species. So for example, if you took a woodpecker and you saw like, oh, we have tons of woodpeckers, we must have a very healthy forest. Well, in the short term, what you probably have is tons of dead trees, right?

That's why you have so many woodpeckers. But in the longterm, if you start to lose woodpeckers, then you can say, okay, something's going on here. So you kind of want that longterm stable population.

But collectively, I think birds make great indicator species in that they rely on so many different aspects of not only a forest stand, but a forested landscape that in order for them to be present and sort of thriving, all those other components have to be working in some way. And the fact that we see huge bird declines in the last several decades, it points to the idea that something's up, probably many somethings are up. But especially if you take something like a resident bird, a bird that really doesn't migrate, and you study the population there, you can start to sort of tease out, like, you know, it's not a problem in Central America if you've got a bird that never leaves Minnesota that's having problems.

You know, it's not a problem with sort of vast agricultural areas that are barren for nine months of the year, that the birds have to fly over just, you know, bare, tilled up soil or something. So if you have a local bird that's struggling, then, you know, it probably is something in our forests somehow. Yeah.

So I think just that sensitivity to them having to have structure, age, all kinds of different insects, you know, the proper structure to nest, to raise young, to not have predators that are sort of out of balance, all sort of make birds a really good sort of top species to say, if birds are doing well, probably everything else is functioning relatively well, and if birds aren't doing well, something's up and we need to figure out what that is.

[Brad Hutnik]

I love the idea of this being a way, it's almost like you could use the birds as part of your assessment. You know, like we do floristic quality assessment where we look at the plants in a site and go, oh, this is really had some disturbance or something else is going on, you could almost do a avian quality assessment, and if you were limited in those species, it'd be like, oh yeah, maybe I do, I'm missing something here.

[Greg Edge]

You mentioned these declines in bird species. Do we know broadly what's causing these declines? If it's, you said multiple factors too, Christian.

And so, I mean, I'm just thinking broadly, do we know if it's on their wintering grounds, if it's on here, like for neotropicals, for their, on their breeding grounds, is it a combination? I mean, how much do we know of why we see those declines?

[Christian Nelson]

Well, first of all, I guess I should say, because it sounds doom and gloomy, but roughly three quarters of the Minnesota birds are stable or even increasing. So it's really, we're talking about one quarter of the species that are declining or are in trouble in some ways. So I don't want to sort of paint a picture that every single bird is struggling.

Some are actually thriving and doing better while others seem to be doing worse. And I don't, I don't mean that in a zero-sum game, like where one thrives, the other one loses. It's really interesting.

The Natural Resource Research Institute, the University of Minnesota's avian ecology lab that I talked about earlier with Alexis Grindish, her team has been involved, and before her, Jerry Neamey, a professor with the University of Minnesota, had been doing decades of bird population monitoring in the Chippewa National Forest in north-central Minnesota and the Superior National Forest in northeast Minnesota. And just going and doing point counts, listening for birds, tracking the number of species, the number of calls they hear, just season after season after season.

And then that really helps to sort of paint a picture for trends. And, you know, tease out sort of the noise, you could say, where maybe just bad weather or something either affects the surveys or maybe just temporarily, you know, you get a hailstorm or something that really affects birds for a given year, but then the population rebounds or something like that. So that long-term multi-species, two different national forest research project really helps to sort of paint the picture on some of those regional trends.

And then from there, because we know the species that migrate and the ones that don't, you can sort of start to look and say, like, are resident birds stable or increasing, but everything else is hurting? Because then maybe that's an indication we've got problems south of our borders where the migrating birds are going. But what we see is, I'm kind of looking at my notes right here from the 2022, which is the most recent I can find, Forest Breeding Bird Annual Report, which the NRI publishes the results essentially from their two different research areas on the Chippewa and the Superior National Forest.

And they find some, like I said, some birds are increasing, some are stable, some are decreasing. And that is true across the different migration guilds. So not all the long-distance neotropical migrants are declining.

Some are, some are stable. Not all the resident birds are thriving. Some are declining.

And so it starts to get complicated because you can't find that silver bullet. You can't find that smoking gun. And what I think what you end up having is you start to look at habitat loss on breeding grounds, but also wintering grounds, which we can do less about locally here.

You start to look at things like land cover fragmentation. You know, that's something that we do have the power to do something about. It might take a big effort.

Another thing that was so interesting about your podcast last month was the idea of the, what do they call it, the Dynamic Forest Restoration Blocks. You know, a way, a somewhat new way, it sounds like, of looking at sort of landscape planning and coordination and ultimately sort of assessing habitat and trying to get it all to fit together nicely. Super complicated.

[Greg Edge]

So it sounds like there's a lot of different factors. Probably depends on what bird species you're talking about then and which factors come into play. Yeah.

It's always easy, like in my mind, to like, Oh, point your finger at a single factor or whatever. But it, it sounds like it's much more complicated than that for us to tease out.

[Christian Nelson]

It is. But fortunately, well, I guess it depends who you are, but fortunately we don't necessarily have to worry about it. Kind of, because you can't do anything about it.

So I guess what I'm saying is to be pragmatic, this guidebook and sort of the effort is to really focus on what we do have control and influence over. And it's not that, you know, you don't want to pay attention to and be an advocate for and sort of pay attention to some of these other factors, whether it's lighting up, you know, skyscrapers at night and having those go dark instead during key migration periods or, you know, continuing to work on power line and maybe wind turbine safety and things like that, or reforestation efforts and diversity across our border, you know, travel corridors and things like that. Green areas, you know, a bunch of things.

[Brad Hutnik]

It felt like to me, like this is in sometimes in forestry, we don't get these opportunities, but here you remember we had that old bumper sticker think globally, act locally.

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah.

[Brad Hutnik]

This is kind of feels like that's our opportunity in forestry to actually apply something like that.

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah, that's a good way to say it. Yep. Yeah.

[Brad Hutnik]

You know, what I thought was really ingenious about the guide, I'm curious about your take on this is there was a statement in there. The forest habitat types used in this guide reflect how birds see forage, nest and shelter in forest, which may be different from how foresters or land agencies classify forests. It's kind of a cool way to look at it, right?

So it's like thinking about it from the bird's point of view, instead of like how we might look at something, you know, we're on the ground versus they get to look at it another way. So what are those habitat types that you're using in the book?

[Christian Nelson]

Sure. Yeah. And just to follow up, it's one, Mike Lynch with the Forest Stewards Guild, the director is reading a book, not about forests at all.

It's actually about prairies, but it's called To Find a Paskquelower. It's by Greg. I don't know how you say his name.

Hoke, H-O-C-H from 2022. And he has a quote in there that says, birds may not be the best botanists and probably care more about the structural diversity of their habitat than the actual species diversity of the habitat. That was just a line that Mike read and pointed out to me because it captures exactly that idea.

This was one of those things that was surprising to me when I was writing the book and we were to choose our forest habitat types. And it was working with Alexis Grindy with NRI, University of Minnesota NRI, who basically said that birds are a little bit species blind, not all birds, but a lot of them are a little bit species blind and are more interested in structure. And that could be vertical structure.

So you have a well-developed overstory, mid-story, understory, or not. Different birds prefer different levels of those things. You've got birds seeing vertical structure differently, but then they also see horizontal structure differently as well.

So that's how things are basically spread out across the landscape. And so I didn't realize the extent to which birds are essentially species blind and are keying in more on structure. And so we actually had a bit of a challenge.

It was a fun challenge, but it was trying to figure out how are we going to... Because the scope of our book covers all of Minnesota's forests. So all the way from the southeast corner of the state, south of Winona to up to the Canadian border on the northwest and northeast part of the state.

So everything forested. So it's a big area. It was challenging to decide how are we going to cover such a huge area, 17 million acres, roughly one-third of the state, of forested lands.

How are we going to basically break this down into something that we can squeeze into a book, have it still be meaningful? And ultimately what we did is we came up with four broad forest habitat types. And these are based on how birds see the forest.

And then we had to break those down into seven subtypes because we wanted to reflect important ecological or silvicultural differences or even biological differences in the forest types. So our broad four cover types are lowland conifer. So this would be things like tamarack and spruce and cedar.

Lowland hardwoods. This would be just any sort of low riparian area type forest. I'll talk about the subtypes in a second.

A very broad category called the upland deciduous and mixed conifer. That's our biggest, most inclusive group. And then another one just called upland conifer.

So those are four broad categories and you can sort of throw all the species under those headings as you wish. But they're not necessarily useful for management or for foresters if they're broad like that. So we had to sort of break them down into meaningful silvicultural subtypes.

Lowland conifer, we were largely able to sort of leave without a subtype. But lowland hardwood, we ended up with a black ash subtype and a bottomland type. 

[Greg Edge]

Hardwoods kind of thing.

[Christian Nelson]

Yep. And so black ash obviously is black ash. And then the bottomland type would be things like American elm, black and green ash, cottonwoods, silver maples, depending on where you are in the state.

The upland deciduous and mixed conifer category, we broke down into an aspen birch subtype, an oak subtype, and a northern hardwood subtype. And then our upland conifer group was largely also just sort of one category without subtypes. That was our way of basically trying to take a very diverse forested landscape and sort of break it down and categorize it and put it into sort of chunks that are meaningful for the birds and for foresters and wildlife managers and land managers that are trying to manage them.

[Greg Edge]

I was just thinking that then the guidebook identifies focal bird species that go with those particular forests. So I believe there's 18 of them that indicate those quality habitats within those examples. So can you explain a little bit or give an example of like how that works, how that focal bird species kind of works then with those habitat types?

[Christian Nelson]

Sure. We had to take what is basically 250 breeding bird species in the state of Minnesota, species that have been identified to breed here, and then whittle that number down into something reasonable. And just for context, I think Vermont and Maine had between 4 and 20 birds.

I think Michigan's guidebook had about 20 birds. So everyone's in this like 4 to 20 range roughly. So we wanted to kind of be in that range as well.

Not that there's anything magic about those numbers. We just felt like we could sort of accomplish what we wanted to without having 150 birds and not having too few. So we started with 250 birds in the state, whittled that down to 150 candidates that breed in forests, and then whittled that number down by basically birds that would respond or have demonstrated a response to silviculture or forest management.

And so they have to be, the bird has to be sort of selective enough that when the forest changes, the bird will start or stop utilizing the habitat because it'll have changed significantly. Some birds are such generalists that it doesn't really matter. And so we wanted to choose birds that if you implemented something on the ground, you could expect to see a change in how that bird utilizes that site.

And we wanted to have a couple of species for each of our forest habitat types. We wanted the species to be relatively recognizable. And we didn't 100% always achieve that, but mostly achieved that.

We wanted the birds to be common but struggling, I think is the way, probably the best way to say that. So we wanted, we didn't want to pick a bird so rare that you would never see it and you could do all the right things in the world and still never see it because it's just so rare. So we wanted a bird that likely anyone that's going out into the woods, especially this time of the year, could hear or identify or see, and it would be recognizable in some way, shape or form, that it's sort of pretty specific to that habitat, forest habitat type, and is probably but not necessarily struggling in some way.

Some of our birds aren't struggling, you know, which is a good thing, but if we implement the things that we've recommended in this book, then they'll hopefully continue to not struggle. The common birds will stay common. And so ultimately we ended up with 18 birds of which, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, about half are species of greatest conservation need, and the other half aren't officially listed as being on the Minnesota DNR's species of greatest conservation need list.

So kind of a mix of common and struggling birds.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, no, that really makes sense though. I mean, I hadn't thought about it that way before. You just, but you need something that people can actually find and see and that have a response and all in, you know, and samples of that, examples of that in each of those habitat types.

Like that's a lot of different criteria going on, but I can see the logic and how you whittle that down.

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah. And then, you know, the key also, you don't want three birds in under one forest habitat type that all need identical things, because then you're just going to be redundant. So we wanted birds that would have slightly different recommendations, even though they're under the same forest habitat type.

The whole book has actually been an interesting exercise in trying to decide what we wanted to put out there first to really identify who we think our audience is going to be and kind of how we're going to hook them in a way or how they're going to find this book useful, why they would want to pick it up and browse through it, implement what's inside. Because there's two approaches. You can put the birds out there first and say, hey, people love birds and they're going to pick up this book because they love birds.

But the people that are actually going to be managing the forests may or may not be big bird lovers. So we need to appeal to them by saying, hey, here's some cool silvicultural stuff. And even if you're not big on birds, there's some other wildlife that we list under each of our forest habitat types that will also benefit.

So we tried to sort of bring in some other species, some birds that weren't on our list, for example, and other non-game, actually some game, I guess, non-game and game wildlife species to just sort of appeal to the broadest audience. At the end of the day, what we're hoping to do with this whole guidebook is make meaningful changes on the ground. The approach of sort of having birds and forests out there was basically a way of trying to gain the most appeal.

So imagine you're a consulting forester and you've got a private landowner there. It's like, hey, I really want more whitetail deer on my property, or I really want to see more grouse on my property. This guidebook then will allow that consulting forester to say, okay, we can do that.

Here's what you have. Here are your options. And hey, also you can do X, Y, and Z, not compromise your original goal, which is maybe a little bit of revenue, maybe some tax incentive programs and the creation of wildlife habitat to improve his deer hunting opportunities or something.

But you can also do these other things without depermenting any of that and doing these things that are also going to work for birds. So we wanted a way for a consultant to sort of use this guidebook to say, hey, landowner, here's some opportunities. Or for a landowner to say, hey, I really like these birds and I really want to do something.

I want to go to my consulting forester. My consulting forester doesn't necessarily know a whole lot about birds, but I have this cool guidebook that I can say, hey, I really like Connecticut warblers. Can we implement some of these things on my property?

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, it's kind of a way, two different landowners basically who have this interest and it's a way to get them to do forest management towards those objectives.

[Brad Hutnik]

Looking for continuing education credits? Check out the Silvicast webpage for more information. And now back to our show.

You know, Greg, we've had discussions where people have had something stopped, right? Like I wanted to do this practice in this particular area, but I had something there that didn't allow us to continue with the management the way it was. And so you're offering this tweaks to kind of change or basically alter your management to take that into account, to be proactive in that, which I think is really good because then you're not getting defensive.

You can actually be out in front of it and kind of work with that stuff. So I think that's really ingenious and it's a really good element of what comes from these. And so me describing those, you know this a lot better.

What would be an example of like a silvicultural tweak to a system that foresters might identify?

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah. So that was kind of weird wording, silvicultural tweak. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, you know what I mean?

[Christian Nelson]

No, that's the word we use.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, right. That's in the guide.

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah, that's in the guide. And we took that out of Michigan's guide and we played with like, is there a more professional word we can find than tweak? We never found it.

Yeah. Never found it. So tweak it is.

So a tweak is basically just, it's just basically small things that you can do that you may or may not have otherwise done to basically improve bird habitat. And so it's not new novel silviculture. It's not some totally brand new technique, you know, coming from some underground forester on the cutting edge of alien technology somewhere or something like that.

So nothing's necessarily new. It's just compiled and presented in a much more digestible way. The Minnesota Forest Resource Council, years and years ago, I think maybe in 2008 and then updated in 2012.

Maybe it's been updated since then, but they have the voluntary site level guidelines. These are the Minnesota DNRs, but I think basically all the agencies in the state use it probably. Basically BMPs.

And it's, I think, a 500 page document. And it's kind of broken down into a bunch of categories. And then there's a lot of overlap between the categories.

And it's a very useful book. It's kind of the gold standard for BMPs in the state. From what I hear at the, all the audits that people do say, show really high compliance with some of the voluntary guidelines that are in this book.

Within those guidelines, there are habitat management recommendations. Things like snag tree, leaving snag trees, legacy trees, riparian management zones, reserve areas, reserving clumps, coarse woody debris and biomass guidelines and things like that. But it's all kind of spread out over 500 pages or so.

And it's not something that a landowner is going to pick up. And it's not something that even a professional forester is going to pick up and go through very often. And so this book was kind of another way of basically giving some of the information in there.

We go think above and beyond some of the information in there, just really consolidating it and making it much more digestible. And we were aiming at two audiences simultaneously with this guidebook. So we have one guidebook that we're hoping appeals to the common lay person with maybe just a passing interest in birds or forestry, while having enough technical details to remain useful to professional foresters and wildlife managers and other land managers.

Some states have done that with two different guidebooks, one sort of with a jargon heavy book aimed at the professional and others with sort of a more layman friendly. We thought we could do it in one book. And I think we did.

Hopefully, I think this is gonna be, I would love to be a guest on this podcast in a year because this book, we just put this thing out and we have our first in-person field workshop on the topic in about two weeks at the Cloquet Forestry Center near Cloquet, Minnesota, University of Minnesota. I think it's gonna be really interesting to see how the different audiences that this gets presented to, this guidebook and the habitat assessment worksheet within, how it gets used and sort of the feedback. I think it's gonna be fun for me to sort of see as I give these types of presentations, what people grab onto, what they don't, what needs clarification, what speaks for itself, things like that.

[Brad Hutnik]

We may take you up on coming back in the future, although Greg, it's month to month with us. So we got to check with Wisconsin Forestry Center. They could pull our plug at any minute.

[Greg Edge]

Oh, okay. I thought you were saying something about our longevity. Yeah, well- Greg told me yesterday, Greg doesn't buy green bananas.

So I'm taking that as a warning. 

[Brad Hutnik]

You're well preserved, Greg. So you're doing good.

[Greg Edge]

Christian, I'm always like, I don't know, as a forester, I'm always looking for, give me some specifics. So I'm setting up timber sale. It has a particular, maybe, it's in one of these particular habitats, say, or it has a particular bird species I'm interested in.

And so where do I go within the guide to kind of get to some of those really specific tweaks for that bird? I know you have like actual biological descriptions and management recommendations by bird species. Is that kind of where I go within that?

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah, you could, again, you can sort of approach this two ways. You could start with the bird or you can start with the forest type that you've got. And obviously you'd want to start with a bird that would be in the forest type that you're thinking about.

So for example, take something like the Blackburnian warbler. Within the guidebook, you'll find that it is under the upland conifer. It's in the upland conifer section.

It's one of our three representative species for our upland conifers. And within the guidebook, you'll see not only, you'll see a picture of it, a little bit about its migration. So for example, it's a medium to long distance migrant.

That's defined in the book, but it basically means it's going to spend its time in Mexico all the way down to Central and South America as a long, if it's long distance. You'll find kind of where primarily breeds within the US. You'll find information about its population status, whether or not it's declining range wide, if it's a listed species in Minnesota or not.

If the partners and flight group considers them sort of threatened across their range, if they're highly susceptible or not to climate change vulnerability based on predictions of how their forest type will do. Some of the community associates associated with that bird. So for example, something that's good for a black burning warbler might also be good for some of the associates, such as the Canada warbler, Magnolia warbler, Northern Perula, et cetera, et cetera.

And then you'll find some, a little box that shows where it nests and where it feeds a little graphic. And then also habitat features and management recommendations. So that's kind of finally getting to the meat of what you were talking about, Greg.

[Greg Edge]

Right, right. 

[Christian Nelson]

So here I'll just read the text from that section because it's pretty short. Black burning warblers breed in mature upland conifer dominated forests with diverse age classes, dense canopy cover, which is defined as more than 75% canopy cover and a dense mid-story.

They require large contiguous forests with components of large overstory white spruce, balsam fir and white pine. And the recommended management actions include maintaining or increasing the conifer component, probably not a problem in an upland conifer site, particularly where white spruce or white pine are present. Promote structural diversity by using variable retention harvesting or other strategies and use a patchwork of large gap management to create a shifting mosaic of spruce and fir in diverse age classes across the landscape.

And so kind of in those management recommendations, you've got things that address the stand level, but then start to tie into a little broader, yeah.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, I mean, in that example, I'm picturing kind of our spruce fir type and a lot of times we have a hardwood component, maybe an intolerant aspen component within that and foresters are managing for that. But what like this is telling me too is like look those opportunities to maintain that conifer component within that matrix, promoting white spruce and foresters would know some of the techniques to go around that and maybe looking at some of these irregular systems just to create that variety of habitat within that. And we've talked too with that type in terms of climate adaptation of maintaining refugia of spruce fir and corridors, that probably all plays into this.

So like in some ways, this is, as you said, it's tweaks, right? It's oriented to silviculture we're already doing, but just maybe making adjustments to get to that habitat structure that those birds are keying in on.

[Brad Hutnik]

It was interesting as you were just talking about that, Greg, it made me think of that concept of the idea of something being a nudge. If you do a small action, but it has an outsized impact and it feels like that's what we're kind of talking about here. These tweaks are really like, you don't have to do something huge, but you could get a really big impact if you do enough of these.

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah, ultimately that's the trick is getting this implemented on the ground and there are enough places to make meaningful change. Again, referring to your last month's podcast, I forget if it was you, Greg, that said this term, but ecological scale, just the idea of like sort of a land, just land, that was another way of sort of saying landscape scale kind of.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, where it's ecologically meaningful, it actually has an impact on those species that you're trying to manage for.

[Christian Nelson]

That was the term, ecologically meaningful. And the idea being, yeah, to sort of implement this stuff on a bigger, broader landscape basis and not just stand by stand by. I mean, ultimately it is stand by stand, but cumulatively, if it's not affecting the landscape, you're probably not having a big effect on the overall population.

[Greg Edge]

Kind of back to my original point, I think for me as a forester, that's the meat that the silvicultural meat that I want to know, like, okay, how do you want me to tweak this timber sale to get to those objectives? And so that's what I was looking at too within the guide that I really appreciate.

[Christian Nelson]

It was tough to try to figure out how we wanted to go about the forest management recommendation section, because obviously you can get a PhD in silviculture if you want. 300 page textbooks are all over the place, not 50 page textbooks, 300 page textbooks for forestry. So how did we want to teach foresters forestry techniques necessarily?

And I think what we ultimately decided is maybe we didn't want to do that. What we wanted to do was basically say, not here's how you cook this, here's how you cook this meal, but here's what this meal should look like. You're a chef, use your art and science and use your experience as a, in this analogy, chef, and get the ingredients and figure out how to sort of do this yourself.

But here's sort of the desired future condition to have these elements. And if I was to boil down our entire guidebook in two years, 20 some people getting together once a month to work on this, all the research and all the information, it would, I think we could really distill this entire thing down into basically 10 important habitat features that we really want to see foresters and forestry focus in on. And how you get there doesn't necessarily matter, but the important habitat features, and they're in the book.

In fact, we've got some really pretty cool illustrations and things like that in this book. But one of them is a section on important habitat features. And what it boils down to is essentially the idea of canopy gaps, vertical structure, large diameter trees, horizontal structure, conifer inclusions, retaining or creating adequate snags and cavity trees, having adequate down woody material, treating and reducing or eliminating an invasive species as much as possible.

Having a leaf litter or duff layer in, especially in a hardwood setting, although that is going to be very difficult.

[Greg Edge]

It's getting tougher these days.

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah. With earthworms in particular, and then just paying attention to riparian and wetland areas and sort of taking advantage of those opportunities and especially not negatively impacting them. But really a few, those 10 elements that our entire guidebook could basically just be like, try to get these 10 elements on your landscape.

In a given stand, try to get a lot of these elements and across the landscape, get all of these elements.

[Brad Hutnik]

I love the idea of kind of that outcome-based approach that you take where you're saying, don't tell me, I'm not gonna tell you how to get there, but I'm gonna tell you what we want in these situations. I think, and maybe this is just kind of like laying up a softball, but that's got to appeal to someone who's like interested in production forestry where you're not telling them, no, you can't do this, but you can do something, but here's what you actually want to have as part of that when you're done.

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah, I think our whole, you know, it's a little bit like the Minnesota Forest Resource Council's voluntary site level guidelines. They were never meant to sort of negatively impact the bottom line or to make, you know, implementing forestry practices logistically more difficult. It was always just about trying to basically get these things put on the ground and just pay attention to them.

And so, yeah, I think the whole idea here is just, can we get these different elements out there? How you go about that, especially on the landscape, you know, that gets so complicated. You know, your guests last week were talking about just how, or last month rather, we're talking about sort of that ecologically meaningful scale and getting these things rolled out and not having everything just on a stand-by-stand basis.

And I forget exactly how he phrased it, but it was, it was having structural diversity within a stand and age diversity across the landscape. And if you could get those two things, I think that was his really distilled down thing, that basically if you can get those two things, structural diversity within a stand, age diversity within a landscape, then you're already sort of nailing an awful lot of wildlife needs for birds.

[Brad Hutnik]

Do you ever hear from foresters like, hey, I'd love to do this, but I just can't get landowners interested in it? Or is it the opposite way around? Landowners are like, man, we got to do this.

And the foresters are like, yeah, I don't know.

[Christian Nelson]

That's the part that I think is going to be so interesting. So, you know, if you invite me back in 2026 to see how, cause I just haven't had enough of that. You know, the book's not even in anyone's hands yet.

So I'd have to go to another state probably where they have a guidebook out for a while and just say, how are people reacting to this and using it or not using it?

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. And the guidebook's available for what is it? Like four easy payments of $19.99. 

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah.  Followed by four more. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Four more. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. 

[Christian Nelson]

It just keeps getting easier really.

So a digital copy of the book is available at the Forest Stewards Guild website. So you can go to Forest Stewards Guild and then under programs, you'll find Forestry for the Birds. And that will give you a link to not only our guidebook and sort of a trifold brochure that's got kind of a nifty sort of habitat assessment graphic associated with it.

But you'll also find links to the Forest Stewards Guild was involved in a similar effort in Oregon. And so we've got a link to our Oregon publication. And then because we didn't partner with ‘em...

We actually, we did have someone from Michigan and we've been partnering with Michigan for a while, but we have a link to Michigan's Forestry for the Birds publication. And it's Lake States relevant.

[Greg Edge]

Well, Christian, thanks a lot. Really interesting discussion. And I think a really useful information to get in the hands of the foresters and will help spread the word here too.

Get that resource out in the hands of the foresters.

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah, really appreciate that. I want to, yeah, stress. The full guidebook is on our website.

It's free. It's a very nice looking PDF. We had a great graphic designer.

It really turned what I had, sort of written a seventh grade science project in between an editor at the University of Minnesota and our graphic designer. They turned it into something that actually looks like not a seventh grader did it. So yeah, it's amazing the magic that they could do to sort of turn what I, the content was there, but it sure wasn't pretty.

And they really did a great job of making it pretty. So, so appreciative of it.

[Brad Hutnik]

Congratulations on the project because it really is an advance on forestry here in the Lake States. So I know I'm a fan no matter what, but a bigger fan knowing you were involved in it too.

[Christian Nelson]

So I super appreciate that. And I, I, yeah, I hope I can be involved in some way in the Wisconsin effort. And I'm really looking forward to the conversations I have at the workshops and presentations that we're doing over the course of the summer and just getting that interaction and learning the challenges that people have, implementing some of this stuff and all things that, you know, could be lessons learned and ways to sort of say, Hey, this is a challenge.

Here's a way to overcome it. And at the end of the day, again, this is all about trying to make meaningful changes on the ground to improve a struggling North American songbird population.

[Greg Edge]

Well, thanks Christian.

[Christian Nelson]

Thank you for having me. 

[Greg Edge]

I'm sure we'll be running into each other.

[Christian Nelson]

Yeah, for sure. 

[Greg Edge]

Brad, that conversation deserves a round of Silvictionary. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Ah, giddy up. Let's do it.

[Greg Edge]

We're going to do a little different here. You won't find these things in your Silvicultural textbooks. This is straight from the Audubon Dictionary for Birders. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, so actual. These aren't made up. This is actual terms. Okay.

[Greg Edge]

Audubon Dictionary for Birders. I'm saying these are highly technical terms.

[Brad Hutnik]

I didn't even know there was an Audubon Dictionary for Birders, but I'm going to set my expectations low. So just so you know. 

[Greg Edge]

So, OK, so here's a term for you.

[Brad Hutnik]

All right.

[Greg Edge]

A twitcher. 

[Brad Hutnik]

A twitcher.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah.

[Brad Hutnik]

That is a twitcher. Oh, so this has to apply to birds.

[Greg Edge]

Yes.

[Brad Hutnik]

Otherwise, I was going to say it could be like a person who just games all night and they've really got some fast reflexes. But it is a small bird that moves fast in its actions instead of going like very quickly. I mean, very slowly kind of moving around.

[Greg Edge]

Good guess. I think that's a really good guess, but it's wrong. Yeah, well, the definition for a twitcher is a hardcore birder who goes to great lengths to see a species and add it to his or her list.

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, keeping a list. I like it. 

[Greg Edge]

I don’t know how you get twitcher out of that.

[Brad Hutnik]

I think I know a couple twitchers. Now I get to use the term. 

[Greg Edge]

So how about this one? An LBJ.

[Brad Hutnik]

An LBJ. That is a, it's not a Lyndon Baines Johnson? It is an LBJ.

[Greg Edge]

Another good another good guess but.

[Brad Hutnik]

It's a type of sandwich that birders like with lettuce, bacon, and…

[Greg Edge]

Don't go there.

[Brad Hutnik]

Jam, jam, yet let’s let's leave it at that. 

[Greg Edge]

OK, again, a valiant effort, but it's wrong. The official Audubon Dictionary definition of an LBJ is a little brown job,

[Brad Hutnik]

A little brown job

[Greg Edge]

Which is a blanket term for a drab songbird that is difficult to distinguish. So think of all like I think all those female birds. The female warblers, you know, they all look the same to me. I could never identify them. So apparently birders have problems, too, making those quick identifications.

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, my daily bird list would probably have a lot of LBJs on it because. 

[Greg Edge]

OK, well, you know, we could go on today, but. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, there's just a whole bunch of terms out there that we're not familiar with.

It's like two different worlds and where they intersect. We kind of get to play at that. Oh, like sometimes, you know, it's like talking to anybody about stuff you don't know about.

Just so many different terms.

[Greg Edge]

I'm sure ornithology has tons of terms that we don't even know. We just scratch the surface.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. You know, Greg, before we go today, too, I should mention we did get some feedback from a listener, Brian in Minnesota, who asked us about one of our recent episodes where we talked about or mentioned oak wilt and just wanted to clear it up and make sure for all of our listeners. We weren't, I think we were talking about in the context of maybe native systems and where maybe it was occurring in more open forests. But just to be clear, we're not saying it's not a problem. And there it might be less of a problem.

But in current situations, in most of the stands we're looking at, it is definitely a problem that we need to deal with as a part of our forest management. So just to make sure no one listened to that and somehow took away that we were downgrading it as a problem or maybe something like that. It's definitely a problem.

It's something we need to incorporate into our management. Just to make sure it's out there and it's recognized.

[Greg Edge]

Okay. Yeah. We didn't mean to minimize it.

[Brad Hutnik]

No, we did not mean to minimize it. So, Giddy up. Well, thanks for listening to today's episode of Sobacast. If you have ideas for future episodes or a question for the Dropbox, or you want to give Greg life advice about, you know, how he should be changing things in his life or moving forward with different things that he's doing, you can let us know, but you might want to send that last one to me because I can really focus it for you and help that really be effective.

Thanks. Yep. You can reach us at UW Stevens Points, Wisconsin Forestry Center by emailing wfc at uwsp.edu. Feel free to include a sound file of your question or comment if you like, and we'll get your voice on as a part of Silvicast. And always remember, we learn best when we wrestle with questions, so please keep them coming.

[Greg Edge]

And take care, everyone. And as always, thanks to our great team, Susan Barrett, our Editor-in-Chief, Joe Rogers, our IT Master, theme music by Paul Frater, and of course, UW Stevens Point’s Wisconsin Forestry Center.