Jessica Webb
editor@thesmokymountaintimes.com
On Jan. 5, the National Park Service celebrated National Bird Day—a time dedicated to listening and watching for birds and learning about their role in nature. Great Smoky Mountains National Park shared this date on social media, noting there are 240 bird species that have been found the park including 52 neo-tropical and that its 816 square miles of preserved land provide a multitude of habitats for year-round residents and migrating birds.
In the winter
While the dead of winter might not be the most likely time to consider trekking into the forest with your binoculars, it is a great time to buy those binoculars if you haven’t already, download the bird identification app on your smart phone and start making plans.
“In the wintertime, birding is very much hit or miss. Birds tend to group up into foraging flocks of multiple species. So, there aren’t as many birds, and they are clumped together. If you bump into one, it’s wonderful; if you don’t then the forest seems awfully quiet.
It takes a little bit of patience and trying a lot of different spots to do winter birding,” said Paul E. Super, science coordinator with the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center in the GSMNP.
“An advantage of spring and summer is the birds are often making noises, and you can follow them. This is a great place to birdwatch by ear if you’re good at remembering bird song. There are a lot of birds I may not see anywhere near all the times. I hear them, I know they’re there it’s quite a chorus, and that in itself can be a lot of fun to pick out how many bird songs and calls you’re hearing,” he said.
A special place
The GSMNP is designated as an Important Bird Area by Audubon Society for its variety of wildlife habitat, from dense hardwood forests to rock outcroppings and a few fields. Cades Cove and Cataloochee, with their wide fields, are among some of the favorite locations for birding. From Bryson City, Super suggests heading to the vistas along Lakeshore Drive and even to the higher elevations in Deep Creek to get a closer look at birds.
The Southern Appalachian Mountains, in part because of elevation levels reaching above 6,000 feet in some places, provide a unique setting to see species of birds that would otherwise not be found so far South.
“There are definitely species that people who live in the Southeast come to see specifically like a red crossbill roughed grouse that are relatively common in Maine but not known in Florida,” Super explained.
Most of the park is mature forest, so there are some species that are less common within the park itself, such as the golden winged warbler. These feathered friends prefer successional forest and are more likely to be seen in areas of the National Forest after a cutting operation.
“Interestingly, in the 1950s and 1960s, one of our most common species (in the GSMNP) was the golden winged warbler,” Super said. “Now, we have only one or two spots occasionally in the park.”
The Smokies are one of the largest patches of old growth forest in the Eastern United States and serve both as a stopover for migrating birds and as a breeding ground.
Warblers and hawks
Wood warblers are numerous and beloved by birders in the Southern Appalachians, particularly in spring, when their coloration is most vibrant.
“Here, we have a substantial number of eastern warblers breeding in the park,” Super said. “They are sometimes easier to see in migration because they are active and moving around together, and if you get the right conditions and go out, the migrants have all plopped down where you are; it’s, again, a wonderful thing to see so many birds at once!”
He recommends where the Appalachian Trail crosses the road in Robbinsville as a good vista for siting warblers as well as Newfound Gap.
“There are a lot of different great colors, and then, if you’re a tried-and-true bird watcher and you want a challenge, there’s nothing more challenging than dealing with confusing fall warblers. You’ve got all the juveniles and adults molted out of their bright plumage and they are confusing,” he said.
In the fall, migrating predatory birds like hawks are often the headliners with annual hawk watches planned along the Blue Ridge Parkway and other rock outcrops, such as Caesar’s Head State Park in South Carolina.
“You can get a lot of cool hawks coming through here in the fall, and some you don’t normally think about like swallow tail kites and Mississippi kites, or we’ll have golden eagles,” Super said. “We’ve discovered they winter here in small numbers, and they like the dense forested areas.”
Challenges
With global climate change and a warming planet, there’s certainly concern over bird habitat and the survival of birds both in species diversity and in sheer numbers.
“You need a lot of different sorts of habitat to protect different sorts of birds…” Super said.
The Audubon Society estimates on its webpage dedicated to the GSMNP and climate change that in the summer, there are 113 current species in the park, with up to 12 potential colonizations and 38 potential extirpations in face of global climate change.
The GSMSNP serves as one large tract where birds can thrive, but Super acknowledges there are concerns about birds and their future survival.
“There’s a number of concerns about birds,” he said. Some factors on survival include habitat loss, a changing climate and even pesticides.
Super works with scientists who conduct studies in the Smokies. One project he looks forward to learning the results of is being conducted by a University of California student that is resampling species of birds and insects that were documented in the park in the 1940s.
Online resources:
Get your copy of “Birds of the Smokies” by Fred J. Alsop:
https://www.smokiesinformation.org/birds-of-the-smokies
Bird calls and Identification:
www.birds.cornell.edu
The Cornell Lab Merlin help identify
650+ North American birds
Climate change:
https://www.audubon.org/climate/national-parks/great-smoky-mountains-national-park
A checklist of birds in the park:
https://www.nps.gov/grsm/learn/nature/birds-checklist.htm
A great hobby
On the joy of birding, Super pared it down to three things: Rarity, diversity and behavior, all of which can be observed among birds in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
“I think the most important thing is to get out, and if you can get out with someone who has more experience than you or someone else also trying to start anew,” Super suggested. “Spend some time huddling over a bird book together to try to figure something out.”