Over the next three years, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the University of Delaware and other partners will release about 100 northern bobwhite quail per year on Letterkenny Army Depot in southern Pennsylvania. The birds have been considered eradicated for at least 20 years in the area.
Chris Williams, a professor of wildlife ecology and the director of the Waterfowl and Upland Gamebird Center, is the lead investigator on the project.
“When we think about the greater concerns about wildlife biodiversity and conservation and changing environments, to see extinctions occur in such a short time frame is scary,” Williams said. “And it’s really exciting when we can take chances to try to find a way to bring them back and make sure it’s a long term success.”
The researchers hope to help the state’s quail population rebound and evaluate what can be learned from how they acclimate and apply it to similar projects. Two University of Delaware graduate students will work with the researchers to study the quail reintroduction and how songbirds at the site react to it. Each bird has been equipped with a radio transmitter so the researchers can track their movement and survival on the landscape.
More than 70 bobwhite quail have been released at the site in recent weeks, including the release of 50 bobwhite quail during a March 19 event.
Jeffrey Buler, a professor of wildlife ecology and the co-principal investigator on the project, said other bird species are also an important focus of this project.
To arrange an interview with Buler or Williams on this topic, click their “View Profile” buttons.
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Across the U.S., cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza are ramping up again in commercial chicken and turkey flocks as well as backyard flocks. HPAI, commonly known as bird flu, is a highly contagious viral disease that is fatal to chickens and turkeys. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 60 million commercial and backyard birds in the U.S. have died from the disease or been killed to contain its spread, since the current, ongoing outbreak first hit U.S. commercial flocks in early 2022.
Wild bird migrations are an especially important signal to the Delmarva Peninsula, a major broiler chicken producing region, that HPAI could be near.
“In the Atlantic Flyway, extending from the northern Delmarva down to the Carolinas, that’s where the bulk of the Atlantic Flyway birds overwinter,” said Jeffrey Buler, a professor of wildlife ecology in the University of Delaware College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. “We get tens of thousands of snow geese that are here in the winter, and they’re just starting to arrive.”
Wild birds, particularly waterfowl, can shed the virus through their saliva or feces. Around this time of year, waterfowl are migrating south, to their wintering grounds.
Buler is part of a team of scientists from the University of Delaware, the University of California, Davis, and the U.S. Geological Survey that has been researching using weather radar to track migrating wild birds that could be carrying avian influenza viruses.
“It gives us an idea of where and when these migrations are happening,” Buler said. “So ultimately, the poultry industry can ramp up their biosecurity.”
Buler can talk about wild bird migrations, what types of migratory birds we tend to see in Delaware this time of year, trends in fall migration and climate, and ongoing weather radar research.
To arrange an interview with Jeffrey Buler on this topic, click the “Contact” button in his ExpertFile profile.
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Biography
Jeff Buler is a Professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware. Dr. Buler established the Aeroecology Program in 2011 and has lead the development of novel methods for using weather surveillance radars to study the broad-scale distribution, movement, and habitat use patterns of flying animals, particularly migratory birds. His broad research interests include avian ecology, landscape ecology, remote-sensing, and conservation biology. In recent years, his research has focused on the impacts of artificial light at night on the flight behavior and stopover distributions of migratory land birds and modeling bird distributions and habitat relationships over broad geographic scales to assess bird response to habitat restoration/management and climate change. Dr. Buler is also a Senior Project Scientist for Agrinerds, a startup company that develops software and hardware solutions for the animal food industry. He leads the development of the Waterfowl Alert Network, a web application that warns the poultry industry when waterfowl, a major reservoir for avian influenza, are in close proximity to their farms.
Industry Expertise
Research
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise
Bird Migration
Radar Aeroecology
Landscape Ecology
Species Distribution Modeling
Stopover Ecology
Light Pollution
Waterfowl
Avian Influenza
Media Appearances
Mapping migration
University of Delaware UDaily online
2023-05-23
“Songbirds are often naive about the places that they’re stopping over; they don’t necessarily know where the resources are or where the dangers are,” said Jeff Buler, professor of wildlife ecology in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. “When they’re in these unfamiliar places, they may be more susceptible to things like predation. Throughout the annual cycle, the migration period is a time when these birds experience the greatest mortality.”
Forest Fragments Act Like ‘Convenience Stores’ for Migrating Birds, Study Finds
Audubon online
2023-03-31
In a study published in PNAS in January, Guo and her colleagues set out to do just that. Using weather radar, the team identified the most popular stopover sites for migratory songbirds—areas where they can rest and refuel before resuming their energy-intensive journeys—throughout the eastern United States. The researchers chose to focus on eastern migratory landbirds because those populations see the largest declines among North American migrants during their travels.
To unlock these mysteries, the team of biologists, led by Jeff Buler, PhD, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at University of Delaware, captured 169 individuals earlier this year and outfitted them with tiny transmitters that communicate with a network of monitoring stations called the Motus Wildlife Tracking System.
“This is much farther than has been considered before when making recommendations about siting wind turbines to avoid such bird concentrations,” says study team member Jeff Buler, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Delaware in Newark. Currently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service suggests an exclusion zone of 3 miles, while the Nature Conservancy recommends 5 miles.
A New Golden Age of Observation Is Revealing the Wonders of Night Migration
Audubon online
2021-04-23
Even for those who study migration, the story is unfolding in ways never before possible. “The more you can see what’s going on, the more fascinating it becomes,” says Jeffrey Buler, a University of Delaware wildlife ecologist. “And we’re making new discoveries all the time.”
How light pollution lures birds into urban areas during fall migration
Phys.org online
2018-01-18
On their fall migration south in the Northern Hemisphere, scores of birds are being lured by artificial light pollution into urban areas that may be an ecological trap, according to the University of Delaware's Jeff Buler.
Blinded by the light: Birds lured into ecological traps by light pollution
United Press International online
2018-01-19
"Shortly after sunset, at around civil twilight, they all take off in these well-synchronized flights that show up as a sudden bloom of reflectivity on the radar," Jeff Buler, an ecologist at the University of Delaware, said in a news release. "We take a snapshot of that, which allows us to map out where they were on the ground and at what densities. It basically gives us a picture of their distributions on the ground."
Jeff Buler, the director of the University of Delaware’s “Aeroecology” Program, is using the very lowest beam of NEXRAD radar to catch birds just as they leave the ground for their nighttime flight—and thus identify the small patches of habitat where they’d spent the preceding day.
Radar reveals bird pile up on shores of the Great Lakes
United Press International online
2016-12-07
"Our study justifies the high value of shoreline habitats for conservation of migratory bird populations in the Great Lakes region," Jeff Buler, a researcher at the University of Delaware, said in a news release. "It also emphasizes that the extent of stopover use in shoreline habitats is context-dependent."
New study identifies bird migration stopover sites
Phys.org online
2016-08-06
"In the Northeast, nothing provides more comprehensive coverage of the land surface than radar," said Jeff Buler, associate professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware who led the study. "It detects birds over more than a third of the land area in the Northeast."
Artificial light at night confounds broad-scale habitat use by migrating birds
Ecology Letters
2018
With many of the world's migratory bird populations in alarming decline, broad-scale assessments of responses to migratory hazards may prove crucial to successful conservation efforts. Most birds migrate at night through increasingly light-polluted skies. Bright light sources can attract airborne migrants and lead to collisions with structures, but might also influence selection of migratory stopover habitat and thereby acquisition of food resources. We demonstrate, using multi-year weather radar measurements of nocturnal migrants across the northeastern U.S., that autumnal migrant stopover density increased at regional scales with proximity to the brightest areas, but decreased within a few kilometers of brightly-lit sources.
A place to land: spatiotemporal drivers of stopover habitat use by migrating birds
Ecology Letters
2020
Migrating birds require en route habitats to rest and refuel. Yet, habitat use has never been integrated with passage to understand the factors that determine where and when birds stopover during spring and autumn migration. Here, we introduce the stopover-to-passage ratio (SPR), the percentage of passage migrants that stop in an area, and use 8 years of data from 12 weather surveillance radars to estimate over 50% SPR during spring and autumn through the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts of the south-eastern US, the most prominent corridor for North America’s migratory birds. During stopovers, birds concentrated close to the coast during spring and inland in forested landscapes during autumn, suggesting seasonal differences in habitat function and highlighting the vital role of stopover habitats in sustaining migratory communities.
Light pollution is greatest within migration passage areas for nocturnally-migrating birds around the world
Scientific Reports
2018
Excessive or misdirected artificial light at night (ALAN) produces light pollution that influences several aspects of the biology and ecology of birds, including disruption of circadian rhythms and disorientation during flight. Many migrating birds traverse large expanses of land twice every year at night when ALAN illuminates the sky. Considering the extensive and increasing encroachment of light pollution around the world, we evaluated the association of the annual mean ALAN intensity over land within the geographic ranges of 298 nocturnally migrating bird species with five factors: phase of annual cycle, mean distance between breeding and non-breeding ranges, range size, global hemisphere of range, and IUCN category of conservation concern.
Using the California Waterfowl Tracker to Assess Proximity of Waterfowl to Commercial Poultry in the Central Valley of California
Avian Diseases
2021
Migratory waterfowl are the primary reservoir of avian influenza viruses (AIV), which can be spread to commercial poultry. Surveillance efforts that track the location and abundance of wild waterfowl and link those data to inform assessments of risk and sampling for AIV currently do not exist. To assist surveillance and minimize poultry exposure to AIV, here we explored the utility of Remotely Sensed Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite imagery in combination with land-based climate measurements (e.g., temperature and precipitation) to predict waterfowl location and abundance in near real-time in the California Central Valley (CCV), where both wild waterfowl and domestic poultry are densely located.
Winds aloft over three water bodies influence spring stopover distributions of migrating birds along the Gulf of Mexico coast
Ornithology
2021
Migrating birds contend with dynamic wind conditions that ultimately influence most aspects of their migration, from broad-scale movements to individual decisions about where to rest and refuel. We used weather surveillance radar data to measure spring stopover distributions of northward migrating birds along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast and found a strong influence of winds over nonadjacent water bodies, the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, along with the contiguous Gulf of Mexico. Specifically, we quantified the relative influence of meridional (north–south) and zonal (west–east) wind components over the 3 water bodies on weekly spring stopover densities along western, central, and eastern regions of the northern Gulf of Mexico coast.
Bird Migration at the Edge – Geographic and Anthropogenic Factors but Not Habitat Properties Drive Season-Specific Spatial Stopover Distributions Near Wide Ecological Barriers
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
2022
Stopping-over is critical for migrating birds. Yet, our knowledge of bird stopover distributions and their mechanisms near wide ecological barriers is limited. Using low elevation scans of three weather radars covering 81,343 km2, we quantified large-scale bird departure patterns during spring and autumn (2014–2018) in between two major ecological barriers, the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea. Boosted Regression Tree models revealed that bird distributions differed between the seasons, with higher densities in the desert and its edge, as well as inland from the sea, during spring and a predominantly coastal distribution in the autumn.
Using weather radar to help minimize wind energy impacts on nocturnally migrating birds
Conservation Letters
2022
As wind energy rapidly expands worldwide, information to minimize impacts of this development on biodiversity is urgently needed. Here we demonstrate how data collected by weather radar networks can inform placement and operation of wind facilities to reduce collisions and minimize habitat-related impacts on nocturnally migrating birds. We found over a third of nocturnal migrants flew through altitudes within the rotor-swept zone surrounding the North American Great Lakes, a continentally important migration corridor.
Repurposing open-source data from weather radars to reduce the costs of aerial waterbird surveys
Ecological Solutions and Evidence
2022
Aerial counts are the primary means of monitoring waterbird populations. A valid population assessment requires a significant proportion of the population to be surveyed. For broad-ranging species, this requires costly reconnaissance flights and surveys over large areas of potential habitat.
Autumn stopover hotspots and multiscale habitat associations of migratory landbirds in the eastern United States
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2022
Understanding the en route habitat requirements of migratory birds is critical for conservation but difficult to know at a large scale. We mapped stopover density of landbirds during autumn migration for the eastern United States using radar data. At a coarse scale, we found that birds migrate across a relatively broad front, underscoring the importance of widespread, locally based conservation efforts. At finer scales, we identified stopover hotspots that consistently support high densities of migrants. We demonstrate that forests provide the most important habitats for autumn migrants and that deciduous forest fragments in heavily deforested regions support especially high densities of migrants.
Relating weather radar data to migrating waterfowl abundance in the Rainwater Basin of Nebraska
The Journal of Wildlife Management
2023
Waterfowl migrations are large-scale events that involve millions of birds moving over broad geographic extents, which make them difficult to quantify and study. Historically, wildlife managers have relied mostly on field surveys, such as visual counts from the ground or air that sample at small spatial or temporal extents, or both. Combining field surveys with remote sensing data comprehensively collected over large spatial extents at high temporal frequency may improve the study of migrating waterfowl distributions.
