Louisiana Public Broadcasting Highlights the Important Bird Areas Program! Watch Video

In April 2007, the Important Bird Areas Program in Louisiana formally identified its first six IBAs. The 630,000 acres, or 986 square miles, of habitat encompass critical breeding, wintering, and stopover habitat for birds of conservation concern such as the endangered Piping Plover and Red-cockaded Woodpecker, the near-threatened Bachman's and Henslow's Sparrow, American Woodcock, Northern Bobwhite, and congregatory Northern Pintail, Ring-necked Duck, Canvasback, Royal and Sandwich Tern, and significant populations of Prothonotary, Yellow-throated, and Northern Parula Warbler. The selected sites in Louisiana represent a range of habitats that include upland pine savannahs, forested wetlands, barrier islands, and bald cypress-tupelo swamps. Louisiana encompasses parts of four Bird Conservation Regions, and has an atypically intact landscape, with fairly large contiguous areas of habitat. It is expected that some IBAs will be small sites standing out in a more developed landscape, but many sites will encompass larger, landscape-scale areas.

Continued efforts by committed members of Louisiana's Audubon Chapters got the Important Bird Areas Program started in Louisiana with the hiring of Melanie Driscoll, its full-time IBA Coordinator, in February 2006. The IBA Coordinator formed an IBA Technical Committee comprised of expert biologists, ornithologists, ecologists, and birders from more than 15 organizations around the state, including state and federal agencies and non-profit organizations. The LA IBA effort is spearheaded by the Baton Rouge and Orleans Audubon Societies with support from the National Audubon Society and significant funding from a State Wildlife Grant through the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The program is based at the Louisiana Bird Resource Center, LSU Museum of Natural Science.

Important Bird Areas Programs rely heavily on volunteer efforts. Already citizen-scientists are contributing to the site identification process by participating in state-wide data collection efforts such as Christmas Bird Counts, Breeding Bird Surveys, and the Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas. The IBA Program will engage volunteers in the site nomination process, and will rely on local IBA Adoption Groups and volunteers as we begin to implement monitoring efforts at priority IBAs. With landowners, volunteers, private, state, and federal partners, we will also undertake outreach and education about habitats and bird populations, as well as conservation planning and implementation, including habitat restoration efforts.

The Important Bird Areas Program in Louisiana is an integral part of Audubon's Mississippi River and Gulf Coast Initiatives, the latter recently established under the authority of Dr. Paul Kemp. These programs are Audubon?s effort to advance the conservation and restoration of coastal Louisiana and restore the overall health of the Mississippi River ecosystem. Through its river, gulf and IBA conservation efforts Audubon hopes to address significant threats to birds including the loss of habitat, degradation of water quality, decline of critical bird populations, and global warming. Global warming is predicted to result in significant sea level rise, leading to the inundation of critically important areas of coastal wetlands and barrier islands. Melanie Driscoll has been involved in conservation planning for the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary in southwestern Louisiana where Audubon is already demonstrating environmental restoration techniques that benefit marsh birds and the wetlands on which they depend.

Updated 22 May 2007