The Kingston Wildlife Research Station is the nation’s longest continuously operating bird-banding station
Graduate student Linda Vanderveer doesn’t live in typical student housing. Instead, she awakens each morning to the sounds of an abundance of songbirds, then glances out the window to see foxes, deer, coyotes, and even an occasional fisher eating apples on the front lawn. The nature preserve she calls home is the Kingston Wildlife Research Station, the nation’s longest continuously operated bird banding station where students and faculty conduct a wide range of avian research.“It’s right on Route 138, but you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere,” said Vanderveer, who grew up on Long Island and worked for the National Audubon Society in New York City before enrolling at URI to study avian ecology. “It’s got a long driveway with woods on either side, so you feel like you’re driving into the abyss. And it has a tremendous amount of wildlife.”
The 86-acre property was purchased in 1950 by Chemistry Professor Doug Kraus, an active bird watcher and conservationist who served on the board of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island for many years. Beginning in 1956, Kraus set up a series of four “mist nets”—nearly invisible volleyball nets running 40 feet long and eight feet tall—scattered throughout his property to capture migrating birds from early August to the end of October. Over the course of 40 years, he caught more than 30,000 birds of more than 100 species, placed small aluminum bands around the legs of each one, and noted a variety of measurements and other data in dozens of handwritten notebooks.
“I met Doug in about 1997, and by then he was already in his 80s and a bit eccentric,” recalled Peter Paton, a professor of natural resources science and now the principal investigator at the research station. “He was a small man with a bad back and a hunched posture that you might guess was caused by the heavy, 10-power binoculars he always had around his neck. Yet he was a very keen birder who drove around birding right until the very end.”
When Kraus died in 2000, he left his property to the Audubon Society along with an endowment for URI to create and maintain a wildlife research station at the site to continue his bird banding operation in perpetuity. His two-bedroom home became headquarters for a biologist-in-residence, typically a graduate student in the Natural Resources Science Department.
Kraus’s notebooks have become a treasure trove of information for ornithologists. For instance, his notes paint a picture of the northward range expansions of Carolina wrens and tufted titmice, two southern species that slowly moved into southern New England during the last 50 years and now are common residents throughout the region. More importantly, Kraus’s records document a dramatic decrease in the number of birds captured per year, suggesting that the population of migrating birds has declined significantly over time.
“Doug never analyzed or published his data,” Paton said, “so while we continue to capture birds and collect additional information each year, we are slowly summarizing his notes and comparing them with observations from bird banding stations on Block Island and at the Manomet Bird Observatory on Cape Cod.”
One obvious result gleaned from the data analysis is that the variety of birds captured at the research station has changed considerably over time, primarily because the habitat has also changed. Abutting URI’s East Farm, the property was originally part of a 500-acre plantation, much of which was used for grazing sheep and cattle. As a result, the birds found there on migration included many that prefer open meadows and grasslands. Farming at the site had largely ceased by about 1939, and when Kraus began banding birds there 17 years later many of the fields had begun to sprout shrubs and small trees, which attracted a different variety of birds. Today, the property is almost entirely forested, again changing the composition of bird species found there.
Unfortunately, as the fields were replaced by mature forests, invasive plants and nuisance species like poison ivy and briers also moved in and degraded the quality of the wildlife habitat on the property. Thanks to Assistant Professor Laura Meyerson and a team of students, including Linda Vanderveer, a plan has been developed to restore some of the property to a state more conducive to a variety of wildlife.
Meyerson, a member of the research station’s advisory board and an expert on invasive plants, gave students in her terrestrial ecology class real-world field experience by asking them to develop a restoration plan for several acres of the site. Early successional habitat—the shrubby stage that occurs for 10 to 20 years as a field is turning into a forest—is declining at a rapid rate throughout the Northeast, and the bird species that depend upon that habitat are declining as well. The students designed a plan aimed at recreating an early successional habitat to attract song sparrows, indigo buntings, brown thrashers, and other species that were once common on the property.
“As a class we did some vegetation surveys in an area that we thought we could return to a more open space,” Vanderveer said. “Our plan takes a three-pronged approach. First, we’re hoping that Audubon staff will come in and hand cut a lot of the invasive shrubs and some of the tree canopy in a two-acre area. Step two is to bring in a sort of ‘biological control’ to keep the invasive species from returning—a small herd of Scottish highland cows. The cows will eat almost anything, including the unwanted plants and shrubs like privet and brier and Japanese honeysuckle. Then this fall we would like to maintain the restored habitat with some mowing or another visit by the cows.”
Periodic maintenance will then keep the habitat in the preferred stage, and data will be collected to assess how birds respond to the new habitat. The students and researchers are hoping that one particular bird will return again next year —a Lawrence’s warbler, a rare and seldom-seen hybrid of the blue-winged warbler and golden-winged warbler that has returned to the station for the last three years in a row. The students have nicknamed him Larry.
It’s not just Laura Meyerson’s class that uses the Kingston Wildlife Research Station as a training ground, however. Peter Paton’s undergraduate field ornithology class visits the site several times each semester to practice identifying birds and to learn how to measure and band birds. And other graduate students, including those studying the physiology and nutritional needs of birds under Associate Professor Scott McWilliams, also use data collected at the site.
“The research station provides us with a unique, 50+ year history of bird migration through southern New England that establishes a crucial baseline to which results from more common, shorter-term studies can be compared,” McWilliams said. “Our commitment to continue the banding station in association with the Audubon Society of Rhode Island ensures that this legacy will continue, and guarantees that generations of URI students will learn the fine art and science of bird identification, banding, and population monitoring.”
By Todd McLeish
Photos courtesy of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island and Dave Menke, USFWS.
