About

The Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest bird migration corridors in the Western Hemisphere, with an average of 2 billion birds passing through the region each spring. Texas acts as the southern gateway to the Central Flyway, a North American migration corridor that leads from the Texas Gulf Coast through the continent as far north as the Canadian tundra. An estimated 98.5% of migrant bird species in North America have been recorded passing through Texas. The south and central coasts of Texas are areas of particularly high migrant bird traffic, especially for waterfowl and shorebirds.

Stopover and wintering habitats play essential roles in migratory bird life cycles, making them an important part of bird conservation efforts. These coastal stopover and overwintering habitats face increasing threats to their persistence from environmental disturbance, pollution, and climate change. For example, intertidal coastal habitats, which migratory shorebirds rely on, have been heavily exploited for residential development, agriculture, and transportation facilities. These habitats also face extreme weather events and climate change-associated sea level rise. Coastal wetland habitat is lost at a rate exceeding 80,000 acres a year across the United States, and climate change models project additional sea level rise-associated coastal wetland degradation, presenting long-term challenges and a need to monitor and conserve wetland ecosystems on the coast in the coming decades.

Migrant birds make important contributions to stopover habitats and communities that they pass through. Ecologically, migrating birds influence local food webs as both prey and consumers, import nutrients, modify landscapes, and disperse seeds, invertebrates, and microbes. For humans, migratory birds are harvested for meat consumption in addition to the historical use of grease and feathers for various household applications. Ecotourism and migratory bird festivals associated with migration stopovers can have substantial economic impacts for local communities, and emphasize their cultural value to those who engage with them. These contributions have made monitoring habitats associated with migrant birds a priority for governments and land managers, especially as it relates to the timing and location of migratory bird presence in stopover and overwintering sites.

The majority of migratory bird species migrate at night. Nocturnal flight allows birds to take advantage of cooler nighttime air, avoid predator detection, and maximize rest and foraging time during the day. This behavior makes direct observation of nocturnally migrating birds difficult, limiting our knowledge of migratory bird movement to site-specific studies or more easily detected species. However, recent advancements in detection technology and remote sensing have created new opportunities for increasing the spatial, temporal, and taxonomic range of migratory bird research. Using these technologies, we have developed a network of remote sensing and monitoring techniques in order to help us better understand what birds are doing on the Texas Gulf Coast. 

Our work has two aims:

Aim 1: Characterize the temporal and taxonomic variation in bird communities within the Port-Aransas Nature Preserve and Fennessey Ranch over the course of the year, outside of and during the spring and fall migration.

Aim 2: Monitor how local activity affects bird communities at each reserve, including humans recreating on site and land management activity.

This project is supported by the 88th Texas State Legislature for the Texas Gulf Coast Research Center at The University of Texas Marine Science Institute.