As spring peeks around the corner and teases the Verde Valley, all eyes are to the sky on the bird species residing and migrating through Northern Arizona, such as the bald eagle, which is currently in its mating season and has a growing population since it was delisted from the Endangered Species Act in 2007.

While the bald eagle has managed to migrate from protections under the Endangered Species Act, others birds still find themselves among the 37 animal species in Arizona listed under the act.

In the Sedona area, three bird species have held onto the attention of forest service entities: The Mexican spotted owl and the yellow-billed cuckoo are listed as threatened, and the southwestern willow flycatcher is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

The Mexican spotted owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1993, but numbers have reportedly increased, according to Janie Agyagos, a district wildlife biologist with the Red Rock Ranger District of the Coconino National Forest.

“When it was first listed, there was a lot of timber practices where we were taking trees and really impacting its habitats in ways we didn’t understand,” Agyagos said. “Over the last couple decades we’ve really learned how to better manage our forest in terms of allowing timber sales and removal of resources in ways that don’t adversely affect the species. We’ve also learned how to reintroduce fire back into some of these breeding areas. So their populations have been increasing in the Coconino National Forest in the last decade …. They are in Oak Creek Canyon, and they are kind of down the rim of all that red rock country that comes down into the Sedona area.”

Regardless of a species’ sensitivity rating, there are ongoing initiatives to monitor and protect all birds and their habitats throughout the Verde Valley. The Red Rock Ranger District of the Coconino National Forest has not turned a blind eye to any species.

For example, though the bald eagle is no longer listed under the Endangered Species Act, its nesting season beckons for monitoring and protection.

“Our bald eagles start courtship [mating season] in December, and by February they have eggs in the nest,” Agyagos said. “In February we still have winter bald eagles here, and they haven’t even left to go back to their breeding area in the northwest U.S. By April, those bald eagles, they’ve left to go start breeding, and our bald eagles already have nestlings already hatched and are already feeding nestlings.”

Keeping Close tabs

To keep track of sensitive, threatened or endangered bird species such as the bald eagle, the Mexican spotted owl, the southwestern willow flycatcher and the yellow-billed cuckoo, RRRD and other entities conduct inventory and monitoring.

“We have several [bald eagle] nesting sites in the Verde Valley, and we work really closely with Arizona Game and Fish Department to make sure that people aren’t recreating right around the nest area,” Agyagos said. “If we do have a high level of recreation, then we will work with Game and Fish to get some bald eagle nest watchers that sit and watch the nest all day, every day, and report if there is any problems.”

Agyagos recounts incidents when babies have been fed fish that were hooked with a line and when nestlings have been left hanging upside down from their nests by fishing lines. This is when eagle watchers step in and call Game and Fish, which Agyagos said responds very quickly.

According to Tina Greenawalt, chief of natural resources for Montezuma Castle National Monument, Montezuma and Tuzigoot Monuments, inventory and monitoring tactics differ among bird species. She referenced the southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-billed cuckoo species to demonstrate different monitoring tactics.

“We typically do surveys during the breeding season for both southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-billed cuckoo,” Greenawalt said. “These are playback surveys done in their potential breeding areas, and a permit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife is required to do these. We also do passive acoustic surveys, which involve setting out recorders that will record daily between certain hours when birds are most active and vocal. These recordings can then be run through software programs to pick out vocalizations for target species.”

A Shrinking Home

Monitoring, however, can be difficult when habitat loss is one of the main reasons contributing to the degradation of threatened bird species.

“The southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-billed cuckoo both rely on riparian habitat for breeding,” Greenawalt said. “If these areas continue to become degraded or lost, then we’ll potentially lose both species to extinction.”

Agyagos expressed a similar sentiment for the two species and noted that the riparian zones in the Verde Valley that they nest in are specific to broad valley floodplain areas, which have undergone damage because of human activity.

“The wetted area in our riparian areas [along the Verde River] is so much more narrow than it used to be when the channel bottom was way up high and just a slight flood would flood out along the floodplain, which would disperse parallel outward and really provide wetted soil for recruitment of cottonwood and sycamore species and things like that,” Agyagos said. “Now the whole riparian zone is not even 200 feet wide in some places.”

She noted that a possible solution to the problem of habitat loss could be to bring the channel bottom higher to the elevation of the floodplain; however, that would be a massive undertaking.

The removal of invasive plant species from birds habitats like the Verde River seems to be the trick that Greenawalt and Agyagos agree on.

Invasive plant species can overtake the native species in an area and create less desirable breeding habitats for birds like the southwestern willow flycatcher and the yellowbilled cuckoo. One invasive plant species that has been rid from areas along the Verde River and throughout the Verde Valley is a nonnative species called giant reed grass, which is similar to bamboo.

It is efforts like this that Agyagos has linked to helping increase the number of willow flycatchers throughout the Verde Valley.

“Just the last couple survey seasons in the Verde Valley, we have been seeing higher numbers,” she said. “We have been seeing them in places we haven’t seen them for years. Whether it’s from an increase in us getting rid of these non-native woody tree species, whether it’s that or other things we don’t know but they’re seem to be a little bit on the uptick.”

She added that at one point it was believed that only 500 pairs of the species were left in Arizona and New Mexico.

While the southwestern willow flycatcher may still be listed as endangered and the yellow-billed cuckoo as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, their future may no longer look so bleak.

From bald eagles to southwestern willow flycatcher entities like RRRD, Montezuma Castle National Monument, Montezuma and Tuzigoot Monuments have park rangers with their eyes set to the sky looking to protect resident and migrating birds in the Verde Valley, stretching from the the banks of the Verde River to Oak Creek and other tributaries.

Makenna Lepowsky can be reached at 282-7795 ext. 126, or email mlepowsky@larsonewspapers.com