Due to growing concerns about the health of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, Utah researchers are conducting surveys of migratory shorebird populations at the lake, and volunteers are playing a big role in the count.
One group in particular is redoing a survey conducted in 2008 to look at the effects of changing lake levels on the snowy plover population.
“So just do like dotted lines to indicate your path. And then you're not differentiating between males and females. You're just recording how many plovers you see. But we're not recording young," said Niku Mojabi, the research coordinator at Weber State University’s Avian Ecology lab, talking to new volunteers during a training for snowy plover population surveys.
Mojabi is working with John Cavitt, a professor of zoology at Weber State whose research has focused primarily on Great Salt Lake shorebirds, like the snowy plover.
Snowy plovers are a small shorebird that inhabit low vegetation areas around Great Salt Lake during the summer months.
The lake’s saline ecosystem provides essential resources for the species during the breeding season before they head south for winter.
“They'll forage within very shallow water, where they'll pick out aquatic invertebrates," said Cavitt. "But they're also foraging here at the Great Salt Lake, for example, on these dry, open mud flats. They'll forage for spiders, rove beetles, things that are along the surface of the dry soils."
Cavitt added that they also rely on brine flies and brine shrimp.
Cavitt and Mojabi have put together a team of both researchers and volunteers to repeat a survey conducted in 2008 that estimated a breeding population of 5,500.
But the lake has changed a lot since then and the bird’s potential habitat has shrunk from roughly 900 square miles to about 500.
“So we're sampling from a smaller area than we did back then, just because of the changes that are occurring in the lake," said Cavitt. "With everything that's been going on with the lake, we've reached past historical low elevations of the lake, and the fact that a lot of people are concerned about whether or not the lake’s ecosystem functioning is still intact."
They started counting the breeding birds in mid May this year and will continue through late June, with a goal of estimating the total Utah population.
They are counting birds in 100 hectare plots and in order to complete the survey within the timeframe, Cavitt and his team rely heavily on the help of local volunteers.
I caught up with participant, Clementine Rain, just after they finished a plot in the Bear River Migratory Bird refuge where they spotted two snowy plovers.
“I’m really excited to just be out in the field looking for these adorable little birds,” Rain said.
Cavitt and his team hope to have a current population estimate for the Great Salt Lake area by early August.
