As we enter a new decade, the WildResearch Nightjar Survey turns ten years old. The program began in 2010 with three trial surveys for Common Poorwill in the south Okanagan of British Columbia by one of WildResearch’s founders, Mike Boyd. The next year, the program was kept afloat by our first volunteer, who completed a handful of surveys on his own in the Okanagan-Similkameen region of BC. In 2012, I stepped in as Program Manager at Mike’s request as I was concurrently studying grassland birds in the Okanagan for my M.Sc. Thanks to some key assistance with advertising that year, the program started to gather momentum and the program recruited more volunteers.
Nightjar Survey volunteers at one of the first orientation sessions in 2013 in Oliver, BC. Photo: Christine Rock
Fast forward eight years, and what was then the BC Poorwill Survey has become the WildResearch Nightjar Survey, with hundreds of volunteers across most of Canada, a standardized national protocol, and an emphasis on all three of Canada’s breeding nightjar species!
And now it’s time for the program to leave the nest. I am beyond thrilled and proud to share that our little nightjar program has grown up to become the Canadian Nightjar Survey, and has a found a new, permanent home at Birds Canada!
We’ve shown how valuable nocturnal monitoring is for nightjar conservation, and so the program joins an important suite of long-term citizen science surveys that are supported by Environment and Climate Change Canada. The capable and bilingual Andrew Coughlan will be taking over the reigns as Program Manager and guiding the Canadian Nightjar Survey into its next phase of operation. You can read about the program transfer from Andrew's perspective in this Birds Canada online article published today.
Birds Canada is exactly the right long-term home for the Canadian Nightjar Survey because they are experts in long-term monitoring programs and the WildResearch Nightjar Survey was initiated with just such a goal in mind. The data from the WildResearch Nightjar Survey has shown its value for a wide range of conservation and management applications, nevertheless the most important purpose is and always has been population monitoring. We’ve suspected since 2010, and have recently shown, that other bird survey programs do not adequately monitor the population trends of this group of cryptical, nocturnal beauties. However, without accurate population trend monitoring, wildlife managers can’t determine when and how species need help to prevent declines.
Common Nighthawk mom and chick. Photo: Elly Knight
Birds Canada has a vast experience in working with volunteers to help citizen science projects flourish. Although we’ve loved every minute, we at WildResearch have been running these surveys as volunteers with a limited budget for the last decade; and the Canadian Nightjar Survey needs a stable home with more resources to ensure it fulfills its potential. Birds Canada is at the forefront of conservation citizen science in North America and has the knowledge and infrastructure to take the Canadian Nightjar Survey to that next level.
So we’re currently busy working with Andrew and the Birds Canada team to make sure the transition is as smooth as possible. We’re thrilled that all the existing Regional Coordinators will be staying on and involved with the Canadian Nightjar Survey; so you’ll continue to have that personal, local, first line of contact. Birds Canada staff are currently busy building a shiny new website and data management system, which will enter the data directly into Nature Counts (where the rest of the dataset is already housed and freely available).
We’ll be sure to keep all our volunteers up to date as things progress and we approach the 2020 survey season! Keep your eyes peeled on the Nightjar News and feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
The maturation of the WildResearch Nightjar Survey over the last ten years would not have been possible without nourishment from many individuals and organizations, and so there are many thanks in order! Firstly, to Mike Boyd; your foresight and initiative is what started this whole thing. A similarly huge thanks is extended to all our Regional Coordinators since 2015, who really made it possible for Nightjar Surveys to become more than just a British Columbia initiative: Paul Preston, Gabriel Foley, Andrea Sidler, Rhiannon Pankratz, Alex and Virginia Noble-Dalton, Samuel Haché, Elora Grahame, Shayna Hamilton, Alicia Korpach, and Amélie Roberto-Charron. Thank you to all members of the WildResearch Board of Directors over the years, whose assistance and support helped guide the program and keep it on track. Special thanks as well to the hard-working technicians that really helped the WildResearch Nightjar Survey grow in 2014-2016: Virginia Noble-Dalton, Azim Shariff, and Alessandra Hood. Thanks to Rob Knight of the Community Mapping Network, who spent countless hours helping with design, hosting, and management of the Nightjar Atlas, without which we wouldn’t have been able to run the program. Of course, thank you to the many funders that helped build the program: MEC, the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, the Nature Trust of British Columbia, the Pacific Conservation Assistance Fund, the Birds Canada Baillie Fund, the BC Naturalists’ Foundation, and the Government of Canada Science Horizons and Canada Summer Jobs programs. In-kind advertisement support from Birds Canada and a huge array of naturalist and non-profit organizations across Canada has also been pivotal in helping build our volunteer base across Canada.
Most importantly, the WildResearch Nightjar Survey would not be possible without our invaluable community of citizen scientists. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you! Many of you have been surveying with us for years now, with a few veterans reaching seven years of surveys. The growth of the WildResearch Nightjar Survey has not always been without growing pains, so thank you for your patience and commitment as we work together towards the common goal of bird conservation.
WildResearch Nightjar Survey volunteers learning to detect Common Nighthawks at sunset. Photo: Jonathan DeMoor
Here’s to the future! We at WildResearch are confident that the next phase of the program with Birds Canada will continue to further the conservation science and outreach goals of the program. Most importantly, we are confident that the Canadian Nightjar Survey will make a meaningful contribution towards reversing nightjar population declines in Canada.
On behalf of the Regional Coordinators and the WildResearch Board of Directors, it’s been a real honour and privilege to steward this program in the first decade of its inception and we can’t wait to see it continue to grow and flourish!
~Elly Knight, WildResearch Nightjar Survey Program Manager
