Ben Wieland of Ashland pulls a Redwing Raven from a mistnet to tag with a number for tracking uses. Ashland Daily Tidings/AMY ALONZO

For the birds

By Maggie McGehee

Ashland Daily Tidings

John Alexander has the job many avid bird watcher dream of.

As the executive director of the Klamath Bird Observatory, Alexander spends his days in the field, monitoring bird demographics in the region, catching, tagging and releasing his feathered friends and educating youngsters on the importance of preserving song bird habitat.

While other agencies are established to protect endangered eagles and spotted owls, Alexander and his group are dedicated to preserving the birds anyone can see every day.

"Our goal is to keep common birds common," he said.

With headquarters located in an upstairs room of the main building on the site of the former Waldorf School of the Rogue Valley, Alexander is the only tenant the Ashland School District decided to allow to stay on the property when the district purchased the site last year.

ASD Superintendent Juli Di Chiro said Alexander's expertise and knowledge of area bird life allowed for a strong educational opportunity for students, leading to the district's decision.

In 1990, amid growing concerns about declining populations of song birds, Partners in Flight, an international land bird conservation organization, began a monitoring program.

"It covered the birds that were not being covered by the Endangered Species Act," Alexander said. "All the little song birds were falling through the cracks."

The first major efforts by Partners in Flight was education and research on song birds in order to understand where bird populations are and to identify opportunities to preserve their habitats, Alexander said.

Some native bird populations in the Rogue Valley, like many in North America, migrate to Central America for the winter, leading to the creation of agencies across the Americas dedicated to the same purpose of monitoring the bird populations and preserving their habitats using standardized techniques in all regions, Alexander said.

In this region of the country, there are more than 7,000 independent census locations, he said.

In order to combine the data each agency collects, the Klamath Demographic Network was established along with several other programs designed to track and monitor song birds. And out of that grew the Klamath Bird Observatory.

"The Klamath Bird Observatory maintains and runs several projects and is part of that network," Alexander said. "We needed a headquarters in Ashland.

"A big part of our environmental education goal is what we are doing as part of our partnership with the environmental education opportunities focusing on bird conservation to the Ashland School District."

This fall, students from across the district can visit the Klamath Siskiyou Bird Observatory housed on the Waldorf property and spend time identifying, tagging and tracking different bird species - something that provides educational opportunities in the field for students of all ages, Alexander said.

"We will go into the classroom and talk about bird conservation and bird monitoring with the students," Alexander said. "This way we can help the teachers to develop bird monitoring projects here. I am hoping that as we develop this, the teachers will bring their students out monthly."

Bird monitoring is done by a person going to the same spot on a regular basis and spending a set amount of time documenting the birds they see, therefore creating a census of birds in that area, Alexander said.

One way the Klamath Bird Observatory tracks specific bird populations is through a process called mist-netting where nets are set up to safely catch the birds. The process gets its name because once the nets are set up, they look like mist.

When a bird is caught, officials record its age and sex, and they place bands on the birds. By doing this, officials over time can see at what rate the birds are reproducing and help determine if their populations are growing or declining, Alexander said.

Alexander is hoping that teachers in the Ashland School District will want to get their students involved in the process. At its site on the Waldorf property, workers with the Klamath Bird Observatory usually encounter 25 to 50 different bird species a day, he said.

"The goal is that through our research we can establish comprehensive bird conservation plans to implement conservation efforts and use the data to identify opportunities for habitat conservation."

The Klamath Bird Observatory is a non-profit organization. For more information on the observatory, visit www.klamathbird.org