Birds of Quail Hollow Ranch: A Study of Avian Diversity

Overview

Objectives/Goals Quail Hollow Ranch County Park, nestled in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, is well-known for its natural diversity. Among the most understudied, however, is the park's avian life. This project was designed to provide an insight to the birds of the park, as limited information is known and no other documented, scientific study of birds has been performed at this biologically important area. From the 1920s, Quail Hollow Ranch's landscape has changed dramatically. Formerly an open grassland surrounded by sand chaparral and sand parkland, mixed evergreen forest and riparian associated habitats have become dominant through secondary succession. As habitats appear and disappear, avian species do as well. This led us to ask "What bird species are habitat specialists and what is their abundance?" Methods/Materials Through a process of weekly monitoring using point-counts, we are able to analyze and interpret which species occur in the park, and determine their habitat associations, as well as the relationship between the birds and ecological succession. Conclusions/Discussion This will provide a #guide# to the park#s present avifauna, and how it may change as ecological succession proceeds.

Awards (1)

• Third Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2010 Zoology · Entry S2404

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Animal Sciences projects
• CSEF Animal Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2010 project
• CSEF Third Place winners