Project Results

I am excited to share some results from our Black Swift Movement Ecology project via a blog post we wrote. https://birdconservancy.org/bl...

Thanks for all your support!

About This Project

The Black Swift, a species of continental concern in the U.S and Canada, has declined by 94% over the past 60 years.

Black Swifts forage on aerial plankton (tiny lifeforms that drift through the air), however, there is no information on the distance covered from their nest sites or their foraging habitat relationships during their breeding or wintering seasons. By placing GPS tags on birds, we will be able to answer some fundamental movement ecology questions.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

The Black Swift (Cypseloides niger borealis) is one of the least understood bird species in North America due to remote nest site locations in wet coastal caves or on ledges near waterfalls. The Black Swift, a species of Continental Concern in the U.S and Canada, has declined by 94% over the past 60 years.

The northern Black Swift breeds from coastal western states and the Rocky Mountains up into Canada. The wintering grounds and migration route for the Black Swift was unknown until we tracked three using geolocators to the lowland rainforest of Brazil showing an approximate wintering range. Foraging distance and precise wintering locations remain unknown.

What is the significance of this project?

Black Swifts forage on aerial plankton (tiny lifeforms that drift through the air), however, there is no information on the distance covered from their nest sites or their foraging habitat relationships during their breeding or wintering seasons. By placing GPS tags on Black Swifts, we hope to answer these fundamental movement ecology questions. During the wintering season we will also investigate whether this species sleeps on the wing similar to Common Swifts (Apus apus) of Europe. By determining whether they sleep on the wing or not will have important implications on how to conserve this species on their wintering grounds. The answers to these questions would be new to science and instrumental to the conservation of this species.

What are the goals of the project?

We plan to deploy five GPS Pin-point tags in 2017, that will record precise locations over a one-year period. We plan on deploying GPS tags during the breeding season from known nest site locations in Colorado and New Mexico. We will schedule the GPS tags to record data at regular intervals and analyze the data using state of the art methods. We will use Hidden Markov models to model foraging and migration movements. These models are flexible and allow us to quantify movement uncertainty.