WISI in Action
Land Trust Partners
In 2007, the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust (OWLT) expressed an interest in restoring a golf course to provide stopover habitat for shorebirds. Now called the Forest Beach Migratory Preserve, this innovative stopover site provides valuable habitat on an important migratory bird corridor known as the Lake Michigan Flyway, a link between Canada and the Northwest Territories and Central and South America for many shorebirds, flycatchers, vireos, swallows, thrushes, warblers, sparrows, and other birds.
In Door County, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is completing the protection of 88 acres at their Mink River preserve through the use of Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and Knowles-Nelson Stewardship funds. These acres were targeted because they hold high value habitat for migratory land, wetland associated birds, and many other species.
TNC is also developing a Coastal Wetland and Tributary Decision Support Tool for Green Bay Watershed. This web map is designed to help conservationists prioritize sites in the Green Bay Watershed for land protection and restoration projects. Numerous GIS layers are included so that users can turn on the layers most relevant to their organization’s mission. The WISI Migratory Bird Habitat Model will be extended to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and added as a web map layer in the near future.
Community Planning
The Door County Planning Department, the Trust for Public Land, and many other partners developed the Door County Greenprint interactive mapping tool for in-depth analysis of lands for natural resource protection and land use planning. “Greenprinting” blends scientific data with conservation goals to help local policy makers make informed, strategic decisions about development proposals and conservation/resource protection. Project goals were characterized using best available data, scientific review, and advanced analysis, including the WISI Migratory Bird Habitat Models.
State Natural Areas Program and other DNR Partners
Thanks mostly to past efforts by Mark Martin (retired), the DNR’s State Natural Areas (SNA) program is involved with several major efforts to protect and restore stopover habitat along Lake Michigan. Our Migratory Bird Habitat Models and known priority site data are currently informing the following:
- Protection of more than 1,500 acres of stopover habitat along Door County’s coast through land acquisition with many partners including TNC, Door County Land Trust, and The Ridges Sanctuary.
- Removal of nonnative phragmites (giant reed grass) along 118 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline and 3,600 acres of coastal wetlands in six counties. Nonnative phragmites replaces native vegetation and provides little or no food or shelter for most wetland-dependent wildlife, including migratory birds.
- A Master Plan for Two Creeks Buried Forest State Natural Area that will provide a 22-acre stopover site in an otherwise open agricultural landscape that has little woody cover available for migrants.
Wisconsin DNR’s Environmental Review Program champions stopover habitat protection and works closely with WISI to develop guidelines for locating communication towers and wind turbines in order to reduce bird collisions. To learn more about the collision issue, please visit our Conservation Threats page.
Private Landowners
Private lands are a very important part of a network of stopover sites, especially along Lake Michigan, where much of the coast is owned and managed by private individuals and businesses. Many of these properties contain stopover features (e.g., forest cover, emergent marsh, lowland shrubs, etc.) determined to be of high or very high priority for migratory birds during either spring, or fall, or both.
Through a variety of promotional events, WISI is encouraging and equipping private landowners with tools and knowledge to enhance their properties for the benefit of migratory birds. In addition to our Grosbeaks Galore workshop, several WISI partners including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Western Great Lakes Bird and Bat Observatory host an annual spring celebration of International Migratory Bird Day at Forest Beach Migratory Preserve.
Research and Monitoring
From our expert ornithologists, we know of many places where birds concentrate during migration and we can show these on a map. Spaces on the map that occur between these known Migratory Bird Stopover Sites represent gaps in our knowledge of where migrating birds stop to rest and refuel along the Great Lakes coastal areas. In order to fill in our knowledge gaps, we can consult the WISI Migratory Bird Habitat Models to find where on the landscape important stopover habitat features occur and then direct surveys, monitoring, and research of migratory birds accordingly.
A new research project called Bird and Bat Migration Along Great Lakes Coastline is using acoustical equipment to monitor numbers of birds at various locations. Each unit consists of a microphone attached to a data recorder that records nighttime calls of birds as they fly over the location. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed these units along the shoreline of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin and along other coasts throughout the Great Lakes. An early Progress Report of this ongoing study suggests migratory birds and bats may move in high concentration along the Great Lakes shorelines that were monitored.