Utah County Breeding Bird Atlas

["Robin Tuck" <robin at utahnature dot com>]

The Utah County Birders are meeting to organize a county Breeding Bird Atlas
(BBA) project on Wednesday, May 7 at 6:30 at Reed Stone?s home, 2262 W 300
N, Provo.  I will distribute a preliminary BBA Volunteers handbook and have
attendees select squares to survey.  While we will be focusing on Utah
County, interested birders in other areas may participate in this experiment
and choose to survey squares in their local areas.

We are doing a county Breeding Bird Atlas project to determine how one
should be done for the entire state.  The Division of Wildlife Resources, in
their Avian Strategy document
(http://www.wildlife.utah.gov/publications/pdf/utah_partners_in_flight.pdf)
stated that Utah desperately needs to produce a Breeding Bird Atlas to
determine a baseline for future avian projects, as many of our neighboring
states have already done.

This important work cannot be done without a good plan and volunteer
assistance. I expect the Utah State project will take 5 years to complete,
depending on the level of assistance obtained.  You are invited to assist in
developing this plan.

I have researched several of the recent state Breeding Bird Atlas projects
and borrowed heavily from the New Mexico BBA project to write our county
project Volunteer Handbook, copies of which will be available at the
meeting.

As part of this project, I have established over 700 3X3 mile ?squares?
covering the state, based on the USGS Quadrangle 7.5 minute topographic
maps, 28 of which are in Utah County.  Volunteers will be able to select
which squares they wish to survey. The surveys will require 4 to 5 visits to
the square during the breeding season, each taking 5 to 7 hours. Some
squares are in urban areas with easy vehicle access, while others are in
very rugged terrain, accessible only by foot.

Birders wishing to participate, but unable to attend this meeting are
invited to contact Robin Tuck (robin@utahnature.com) for more information.

A preliminary, and very incomplete web page has been set up to support this
experiment, at http://www.utahnature.com/bbs/home.php. The web page has
taken a back-seat to the development of the Volunteers Handbook, and will be
updated after the meeting. Comments about this web page and any of the BBA
materials and strategies are welcome. Please note that the web page is under
constant development and may fail or have changes at any time.


Robin Tuck
Special Projects
Utah County Birders


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