Volunteers and organizers wrapped up Wisconsin's five-year statewide breeding bird survey with a new wrinkle as a volunteer sighted a glossy ibis pair and their young at Horicon Marsh, the first time this Atlantic Coast bird has been documented nesting in Wisconsin.
The glossy ibis brought the total number of species confirmed as breeding in the state since 2015 to 226.
Birdwatchers, nature centers, bird clubs, nonprofit organizations and government agencies all worked together on the survey, coordinated jointly by the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, the DNR and other groups.
Ryan Brady, is a DNR conservation biologist and science coordinator for the survey, known as the Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas II.
This was the fifth and final year of data collection for the atlas...
"....We had over 2,000 volunteers who went out and surveyed almost 1, 300 survey blocks that were about 3 by 3 square miles and look for every bird they could find in there and give us relative numbers of each and look for breeding evidence, to document whether the bird was actually nesting or not..."
He says with the data collected they're going to begin analyzing the data which will eventually be a printed book. Brady says they found 13 species in this year's collections that were not found in the previous collection...
"There's a few duck species in there that are kind of rare....there's a few southern species that have worked their way northward...and then there's a few conservation success stories that we have nesting now that we didn't before like Kirtland's warbler..."
More information on the survey is at the website ebird.org
