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Rare marsh birds find nearby home
Date published: 8/6/2005
By RUSTY DENNEN Bryan Watts and fellow scientists with the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William & Mary have been doing some detective work in marshes along the Rappahannock River. Last summer, a Northern Virginia bird-watcher reported seeing 14 rare coastal-plain swamp sparrows on the river near Tappahannock, so they decided to investigate. What they found was surprising. Several of the small gray-and-rust-colored birds, a sparrow subspecies, were not only living there, but nesting and singing. The bird was first described from a specimen taken along the Nanticoke River on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1947, Watts said. Until now, the sparrows have been concentrated in salt marshes in New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. "Other than a small number of observations in the Dyke Marsh area on the Potomac River [below Washington], there are no modern breeding records for Virginia," Watts said. What's also significant, he said, "is that over the past century or so there's been a contraction in their range." The birds are not listed as endangered or threatened, but only several thousand pairs are thought to exist. So how did the sparrows wind up in Tappahannock? One possibility: "It could be that they've been on the Rappahannock all along," Watts said. He and his colleagues examined Mulberry Point Marsh this spring, and found two other sites along the river harboring the birds. Watts said it will take more visits and study to determine just how many are there and how many are nesting. "This is in kind of an early stage of documentation," he said. Much about the secretive bird's lifestyle has been a mystery. For example, the sparrows would leave their home range in the winter, but until recently no one knew where they went. Russell Greenberg, director of the Migratory Bird Center at the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoological Park, has been studying swamp sparrows for more than 20 years. He traced some wintering birds to spots along the North Carolina coast. The finding was featured in latest issue of Inside Smithsonian Research. The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation's Division of Natural Heritage lists the swamp sparrow as "extremely rare and critically imperiled with five or fewer occurrences, or very few remaining individuals in Virginia."
Date published: 8/6/2005
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