Breeding Bird Inventory at Petroglyph National Monument 2022 - Open Format Dataset

Data Set created during the Breeding Bird Inventory at Petroglyph National Monument that includes events conducted and species occurrences obtained. Please refer to the project for more information found here: https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2302577. We used (1) point-count surveys to inventory breeding birds across the full extent of the monument and (2) area searches to understand if proposed escarpment trail-crossing locations would affect nesting habitat. We conducted 196 point-count surveys and 15 area searches, detecting 57 species in over 1200 detections; using these data, we estimated breeding densities for nine species. We found distinct bird communities in grassland, shrubland, and rocky escarpment habitat, and at least 27 species of open-habitat and pinyon-juniper passage migrants. However, suburban expansion showed pronounced effects on bird spatial distributions: non-native and generalist species were most common near the suburban boundary, while grassland-specialist species showed an aversion to non-grassland edges. We found no evidence of raptor breeding behavior during area searches, likely because the nearby riparian corridor provides superior nesting habitat, and many areas of the escarpment are subject to high human disturbance. The proposed trail network will likely reduce the negative impacts of social trails on breeding birds and is unlikely to significantly affect raptor and songbird nesting habitat on the escarpment.