Community partners in bird protection gather at University of Regina to discuss conservation

The University of Regina held an information session on the risks birds face in cities and efforts to create safer spaces for them. Damian Smith has the story.

Community partners gathered at the University of Regina on Friday to focus on bird conservation, presenting “Fragile Flight: Bird Conservation in Human Spaces.”

It was a day to learn, reflect, and create engagement to focus on the challenges that birds face in built environments.

Nature Regina says they’ve taken care of 55 different types of birds in their program, with the most common ones being migratory sparrows, yellow warblers, woodpeckers, as well as flickers.

“You can put some products up on your windows to kind of cut down the glare and the transparency of those windows,” said Ryan Fisher, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM). “People can keep cats inside, if that’s possible. Cats do kill a lot of birds in the city.”

One of Regina’s most prominent birds is the Canada Goose, which Fisher says can be aggressive at this point of the year, especially when protecting their children.

“There are definitely complaints when geese are sort of in the same places,” Fisher said. “So, it’s finding that balance of understanding where we might have to intervene and other cases where we maybe don’t need to.”

As for bird populations in the prairie region, Ted Chesky, naturalist director of Nature Canada, cited a study published in 2019, where nearly 2.9 billion breeding adult birds have been lost since 1970.

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“Since then [2019], Canada has updated its state of the birds that they are reporting, led by Environment Climate Change Canada, the government and Birds Canada, and all of that data suggests that nothing radical has changed,” he explained.

“In other words, some of those declines have stabilized a bit, but the populations now are at a lower level than they were. The declines might not be as steep, but their populations have dropped.”

Chesky said there has been a “tremendous loss” of habitat in the native grasslands in Saskatchewan.

“Those smaller areas, that group of birds that is associated with, which the heart of the population of Canadian grassland birds is in Saskatchewan, Alberta, to a certain extent in Manitoba, that group of birds has declined the most of any group of birds in Canada, according to the latest ‘State of the Birds.’ I think it’s like 65 per cent of the population has been been lost in general.”

He said that the Sprague’s pipit and the chestnut-collared longspur have been impacted, living in the grasslands.

While biodiversity has declined historically, there’s a silver lining - that is overall education for the average resident in Saskatchewan. Bird apps like eBird, iNaturalist and Merlin Bird ID can help with identifying birds.

“Birds can easily inspire people,” Jeffrey Gamble, vice president of Nature Regina, said. “It’s so fascinating to go outside your front door and be able to encounter 20 or 30 different species of birds in a matter of a few hours.”

“It really revolutionized people’s ability to actually want to know what’s around them,” Chesky said. “You stick your phone out your window and you come back with a list of the likely birds that are there.”

Saturday is World Migratory Bird Day, highlighting community science, bird population monitoring and habitat conservation.