Curlew Survey Volunteer Opportunities
The Curlew’s have been busy!
Hopefully you have had the good fortune of seeing or hearing a Long-billed Curlew on one of your birding adventures this year. Volunteers have been hard at work in the Helena, Mission, and Blackfoot Valleys looking for these large shorebirds, but we wanted to let you know there is still time for you to participate too! Surveys continue until May 31st.
Long-billed Curlews offer the perfect opportunity to involve citizen scientists, to collect more details on local curlew hotspots. It’s easy: survey routes consist of early morning road-side stops repeated every half mile. At each stop, you will get out of the car for five minutes and look and listen for curlews. Along the way you will collect important data on the time, habitat, and presence or absence of curlews.
The best way to get involved is to visit our survey website to view the routes available in the Mission Valley, Flathead Indian Reservation and Blackfoot and Helena Valleys: montanabirdsurveys.com. Here you will find survey details such as the protocol, data sheets, and route maps. You can also contact Amy Seaman if you would like a printed route packet. Feel free to take a partner, do a route more than once, or do more than one route. The Curlews are just waiting to be found!
To brush up on your Curlew identification before heading into the field visit Montana Audubon’s webpage for a link to the Curlew’s call and much more. Also visit Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All about Birds.
For more information contact Amy Seaman: [email protected], 406.210.9449