Pam Hunt grew up in an outdoorsy family in upstate New York. Her first camping outing came at the tender age of six months old, and she continues to enjoy camping and kayaking, always on the lookout for birds and dragonflies. She is the senior biologist for avian conservation at New Hampshire Audubon, working closely with the state’s Fish and Game Department in this role. An avid birder, Pam hopes to spot all the endemic birds of the West Indies; currently she has found 173, with 19 species remaining. When she’s not at work or out exploring the woods and water, Pam is likely to be at a Renaissance Faire, often in full costume.
I was always into critters, as far back as I can remember. I got into birds when I was 12. I had a great uncle who was a botanist, and he took us to the Brigantine National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey one year. (Now called the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge.) It’s on the Atlantic Flyway. It was early November, and there were snow geese by the thousands and lots of herons and ducks – tons and tons of birds. Before that, I was mostly into reptiles. But that experience flipped the switch. There are a lot more birds in the Northeast than there are reptiles.
I knew I wanted to study birds in college. I applied to Cornell early decision because of the Lab of Ornithology, which at the time was nothing like it is today. Back then it was a little center with a few people working there. They basically had the sound library, which is still a big thing. They housed the puffin project and the Peregrine Fund, but it wasn’t the big, encapsulating entity that it is now. I was an ecology and evolutionary biology major at Cornell. Then I did a master’s at University of Montana in Missoula, which is a beautiful place, and came back east to Dartmouth to get my PhD. I did 13 years in college without a break, and I recommend not doing that. I had two weeks between defending my master’s and starting my orientation at Dartmouth – so, I left Montana, drove cross-country, found a place to live, and it was time to start.
My PhD was focused on habitat selection by the American redstart along with the successional gradient of northern hardwood forest. Basically, how does forest age affect redstarts? Redstarts are a declining species. There were some suggestions that forest maturation might have been part of that, which is certainly true for other species that are in decline. I had study sites all over, including at Hubbard Brook, ranging in age from 4 years after harvest to over 100 years. I did bird surveys and tried to figure out whether certain habitats had more males, young males, mated males. And my research indicated that the younger forest was better for redstarts. Then I made a mathematical model that looked at historical forest age data and plugged in redstart numbers to see whether or not changes in forest structure could explain population trends. And it did. That doesn’t mean that’s the only factor in the species’ decline, but there is evidence that local habitat configuration can potentially drive these things.
I’ve been at New Hampshire Audubon since August of 2000. When I started, my job was tied to a big grant to do a biodiversity project. At the same time, New Hampshire Audubon had long been the non-game bird arm of Fish and Game, and Audubon was already contracting with the state on projects involving bald eagles and peregrine falcons. John Kanter, the non-game coordinator for Fish and Game at the time, wanted to capitalize on my ornithological breadth, and we started adding other species – grasshopper sparrows, purple martins, sandpipers, nighthawks – a bunch of the species listed in the state that really hadn’t been paid attention to at all. That slowly evolved until I was essentially the state ornithologist. I basically handle all birds that aren’t being covered otherwise. Obviously, I’m not studying all birds, or even working on conservation for all birds, but the job became helping to prioritize what needs to be done with other species and figuring out ways of making it happen. That came out of the first wildlife action plan in 2005.
This year we’ve been working on a collaborative wood thrush project with U.S. Fish and Wildlife, looking at migratory connectivity of wood thrushes across their entire range. They breed everywhere east of the Great Plains, from southern Canada to southern tier states, barely into Florida. They spend the winter from southern Mexico all the way to Costa Rica, and they migrate back and forth. Wood thrush populations have been declining – in some places that decline has moderated, and in some places it’s actually reversed. We still don’t know a lot about what specific things drive populations of migratory birds. We know the theory, but if wood thrushes in New England are declining still, and the ones in Wisconsin are increasing, what’s going on? What’s different? It could be things that are happening with nesting, for example different land use patterns in Maine versus Wisconsin. It could be differences in where they winter. So, if the Maine birds winter in one area and the Wisconsin birds winter in another area, which is maybe less deforested, that would affect overwintering survival, and that population that had less habitat would potentially decline more rapidly. It could be affected by where they migrate through. Birds on the East Coast have to navigate a lot more light pollution than birds in parts of the Midwest. Is habitat loss along the route important? To tease it all apart, you need to learn how populations are connected.
The project as a whole has put out 560 Motus tags in about 20 states and Ontario. By September, the birds we’ve tagged will start migrating and they’ll be picked up whenever they pass within 10 to 15 kilometers of a Motus tower along the route. We’ve tagged 27 birds in New Hampshire, and once they get moving there’s a really good chance that they’ll hit multiple towers between here and the Gulf of Mexico, and then we’ll know more about their fall migration route. There are enough towers now that we can get almost real time migration speeds.
With 560 wood thrushes tagged as part of this project, we’re going to learn a ton. The tags should last a year, so even if we don’t find out where the birds went in the winter, we’ll get the spring migration route and see whether southbound and northbound migration routes differ. If we’re really lucky, we can recapture some of the same birds if they come back to their same breeding territory, and put a new tag on them and get a second year of data. In the meantime, this winter, a partner in Latin America is putting on 150 tags between Mexico and Costa Rica. Hopefully we’ll see some good overlap, because we’ll be basically covering the entire winter range. It should be complementary.
The guiding force is one person at the Fish and Wildlife Service – Sarah Kendrick – who came up with this idea. Every state is its own entity. We have a common protocol that Sarah developed, so everyone involved is using the exact same tags and the same way of attaching the tags. Eventually it’s all going to feed back up into one giant pile of data. That’s going to take a couple of years for the lead people to sort out.
I love having the opportunity to look at the big picture stuff. New Hampshire is a tiny state. We are silly to think that what we do here is the only thing that’s going to benefit birds that travel thousands of miles every year. I can study cliff swallows in New Hampshire, because they’re declining and rare, and I can learn some things about this species. But what’s happening here is probably not what’s happening somewhere else. The threats to cliff swallows that breed in New Hampshire are probably not things we can address in New Hampshire. That means that we need to look at swallows where they are in February. That’s the thing that’s cool about the wood thrush project – it allows us a chance to be looking at the whole picture, the whole time.
I’m also involved in Partners in Flight, which is sort of a loose partnership of organizations working in bird conservation. I’m on the steering committee for the Eastern Working Group, which covers everything east of the Great Plains. We try to come up with ways of making the implementation of conservation more efficient across scale. That’s never easy, because there are so many different partners. In the long run, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for folks in different states or NGOs to independently come up with solutions that someone else already figured out. It’s a slow process with a lot of cat herding, but when things work out, it can be very satisfying.
People often want to make their properties better for birds, and there are organizations that have programs geared toward that – gardening for birds, habitat management for birds. And if you create big chunks of habitat for birds – if you keep a large chunk of forest intact – that also benefits other wildlife species. But there are also all the little things that people don’t think about, like cats and window collisions. Those are the two biggest causes of mortality outside of habitat loss for birds in North America. I think since the pandemic, there’s been an increase in people interested in birding. There are all of these things that have made it easier and less dorky for people to get into birds. The more people that are into birds, hopefully the more interest there is in conservation. Those little inroads are maybe what slowly moves people toward being more aware.
As I was starting at Audubon, I also got into dragonflies. I just came across a dragonfly, and I thought, “This is a cool-looking critter. What is it?” I looked it up and found out what species it was, and in the process, I learned that there are all sorts of other wonderful dragonflies and damselflies, and I got totally sucked into them. So now I’m also the state expert in odonates.
As a kid, I camped mainly in the Adirondacks, although we’d also go to Acadia, and once we took a multi-week trip around the country. I still camp, mostly in New England, and mostly tent camping. Ten years ago, I took a 5-week road trip. I drove to the Pacific Ocean and back. I followed the Lewis and Clark Trail and camped along the entire way – except a couple nights at friends’ houses and once at a hotel during a tornado warning. My girlfriend and I camped up in Pittsburg this summer. Sometimes we go to Cape Cod, and our favorite campground on the Cape is by Provincetown, run by the Trustees for Reservations. You can walk downtown from the campground.
I also like going to Renaissance Faires, and yes, I get dressed up for those. I have some big, medieval gowns, and I have a pirate costume and various other things. There are several of these fairs that are reliable annual events around New England. There’s always entertainment. People play music – not necessarily medieval or Renaissance music, because there’s not much of that and it’s kind of boring – but Irish pub tunes and sea shanties and fun things like that. There are people that do fire shows and juggling. Then you walk around and watch other people with their cool costumes. So, there’s the secret world of the state ornithologist.