Making maple syrup and protecting birds that use maple sugarbush as nesting, resting, and foraging habitat can go hand in hand. As a conservation biologist and forester, Steve Hagenbuch knows this well: he spearheaded the creation of Audubon Vermont’s Healthy Forests Initiative and oversees the Bird-Friendly Maple Project. Here is a video of Steve presenting on bird-friendly sugarbush management that he practices at the Green Mountain Audubon Center and on his family’s own property, along with an excerpt from a Community Voices interview with Steve from July 2021.
Vermont leads the country in maple syrup production annually. But our forests also support some of the highest richness of nesting bird species. Sugarbushes are one of our key strategies for bird conservation – to have those sugarbushes managed in a way that, in addition to producing sap, also supports a healthy and vibrant and productive bird community. With Audubon’s Bird-Friendly Maple Project, we bring that outreach to our industry and maple producers to help them understand this parallel and as a marketing angle.
We recognize maple producers who intentionally consider bird habitat in the management of their sugarbush. That entails doing an inventory and assessment of their sugarbush from a habitat view, writing up the findings, and the maple producers agree or not to managing those areas where we found as gaps between what they have and what would be most desirable for bird habitat. And if they sign off on that and agree to manage for bird habitat in the future, they get labels for their products and a sign they can hang on their sugarhouse or farmers market. I am one of those producers.
Sap production is obviously very important, but my view is it shouldn’t come at the expense of a healthy forest and a forest that supports all the other inhabitants. One example of this – I had this one beautiful dead standing tree, a snag, right in the midst of my tubing network, and the pileated woodpeckers had been working it for many years. A lot of maple producers don’t want that dead snag. That snag eventually becomes what we call down woody material – it falls down, takes out the lines, you have to repair them. Sure enough last winter, my snag came down and took a line with it. But while I may have said a few choice words when I discovered it, that’s all part of the system. If I’m going to work in the woods, which is a natural system, I need to be willing to work with that system and everything that it brings, and not just impose my own will on it.
The birds that we highlight are the top birds that I found in sugarbushes during my graduate research, and they’re birds of high conservation concern. Some of the species we talk a lot about are the wood thrush, the scarlet tanager, and the black-throated blue warbler. The black-throated blue warbler nests only in the understory, so woody-stemmed vegetation up to 5 or 6 feet in height. A lot of black-throated blue warblers tell us there’s well-developed patchiness in that forest, which we want to see – not only for bird habitat, but if some of that understory is sugar maple, then that’s the next sugarbush. All that young growth is the next forest.
Managing a forest with birds and other wildlife in mind is often made up of the same strategies that are effective for managing for climate adaptation and mitigation. It’s this complexity, diversity, composition, structure. People get overwhelmed quickly when they’re thinking about how they can mitigate climate change, but they can do this at the parcel level. Managing for timber, for wildlife habitat, for climate change – they’re not these mutually exclusive things. There are very complementary nuances between them. They can work together very well. We’re in a place where a lot of the threats to our forests we can be addressing through management, in the way we interact with the land. I think that’s promising.
This web extra accompanies the article Bird-Friendly Maple Sugarbush Management with Birds in Mind by Brett Amy Thelen in the Winter 2022 issue of Northern Woodlands.