Photo By Aaron Perkins | Rich Scheely, Wildlife Biologist (left) retrieves a burrowing owl for data collection...... read more read more
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UMATILLA, Ore. - For the past 15 years, wildlife volunteers and multiple agencies from Oregon have been busy keeping tabs and performing research on the burrowing owls at the Oregon National Guard’s Rees Training Center (RTC), formally known as Camp Umatilla/Umatilla Chemical Depot, outside Hermiston, Oregon.
The project first began in 2008, when Don Gillis, the natural resource manager at the RTC, noticed a decline in the nesting areas for the burrowing owls on the installation. The decline was due to a lack of badgers, prairie dogs and the like, which created natural tunnels the owls used for spring nesting.
Fortunately that same year, Gillis bumped into Mike Greg with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, who mentioned to him about a man in Virginia who was the leading expert in owl conservation. That man was David H. “DJ” Johnson, director of the Global Owl Project.
In a 2019 Oregon Public Broadcasting interview, Johnson mentioned how it started for him here in Oregon.
“When I came to the depot to work on the burrowing owl project, there were three or four pairs and we knew that this was the last of them,” Johnson recounts. “And it’s really hard to recover from zero. So then the question is: what do you do?”
It was then that Gillis and Johnson devised a plan to make artificial tunnels for the owls to nest in, thus replacing the natural tunnels that other native animals usually created. From there, the project took off.
In a 2020 interview Gillis recounted, "One male owl waited on a perch watching them install one of the nesting tunnels,” he explained, recalling the early work man-made tunnels. “As soon as they finished and were walking away the owl flew down and took ownership of the nest."
As of today there are 84 burrows in total on land managed by the Oregon Military Department (OMD) and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR).
Most recently, from May 22-25, the RTC hosted valuable training conducted by the Department of Defense (DoD) Avian Knowledge Network (AKN) Program, which was brought together by the DoD, National Guard Bureau (NGB), and the OMD Environmental Branch with program partners US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), Point Blue Conservation Science and Klamath Bird Observatory (KBO).
The AKN has progressed into the primary multi-agency repository for all avian monitoring and research data across the nation and is endorsed and mandated for use by all DoD military branches and installations via an Office of Secretary of Defense Memo signed June 2022. This collaborative program will enable the DoD to have readily available avian data to assist with National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) environmental reviews and to evaluate operational and training activities in relation to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA).
Elizabeth Neipert, Research Wildlife Biologist and DoD AKN Program Director with ERDC, was onsite to help lead the course, remarked about the on-going training.
“Every installation across the U.S. has regulatory requirements to know what bird species are on their property (via the MBTA, NEPA, Sikes Act and Executive Order 13186), and collect some form of bird data,” she said, describing the study, “and we do not have a centralized repository for that data, let alone even at the installation level.”
This is where the AKN database and the current training at RTC comes into play. Attendees will learn how the system is organized, how to create project metadata and input the data from various survey methods. Attendees will also learn how data sharing levels work, and how to visualize, analyze, and aggregate data for conservation management. They will leave with the capability to upload, archive, access, and use extensive avian data tools to support their environmental management of military training lands and to report information back to DoD.
“The AKN has a program structure setup for DoD, where we have a DoD-wide program, each military branch has a sub-program, and then each installation has their own project, that they can enter all of their data and surveys into,” said Neipert.
In a time where the federal government sometimes doesn't have transparency or always share data with other agencies, this is a positive step in the right direction where the individual departments can then share their avian data with whomever they wish.
Neipert explained further that, “for this situation here (at RTC), because you have so many partners with the tribes and the state, it would allow for data-sharing on any of the bird surveys where they partnered together.”
“The AKN is not just for the DoD. DoD got involved with a partnership of other federal agencies like US Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service and the National Park Service.”
The AKN network even crosses into State, Federal and Non-government Organization (NGO) collaboration that the DoD has partnered with on other projects. The possibilities for conservation and management will greatly impact the wildlife future on all DoD installations, and beyond to help them make better decisions down the road to see what’s working and not working.
“All of that data can be pulled together and queried, analyzed and looked at, at various levels. The power of the databases is really incredible,” said Neipert.
The long term data collected during the 15 years of the owl monitoring at the former Umatilla Chemical Depot is one example how the data can be entered into the AKN system and shared across partners for long-term conservation of this Mission-sensitive Species. As part of the training, participants were able to get into the field to understand how bird data is collected. CTUIR staff were on-site to provide hands-on learning of how the owl trapping, banding and monitoring data is collected.
| Date Taken: | 06.05.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 06.05.2023 19:00 |
| Story ID: | 446274 |
| Location: | UMATILLA CHEMICAL DEPOT, OREGON, US |
| Web Views: | 237 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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