Influence of Forest Vegetation Structure on Avian Community Composition in West-Central Idaho

Abstract

Abstract Locally derived information is needed if management guidelines intended to improve wildlife habitat are to be relevant, reliable, and applicable. Within the Intermountain West, few studies have examined habitat relationships of forest songbirds in mixed-conifer forests. During 1996–1997, we studied breeding bird communities in a mixed-conifer forest in west-central Idaho, USA, to describe how relative avian abundance was related to forest structure. Our study objectives were to 1) describe bird use of 3 distinct forest age-classes, 2) identify groups of species that expressed similar relationships with forest structural attributes, and 3) model species-specific bird–habitat relationships. We sampled 46 study sites (forest stands) classified into 1 of 3 common “vegetation growth stages” (seral stages): 1) shrub/seedling/sapling (n = 15 stands), 2) small tree (n = 16 stands), and 3) old growth (n = 15 stands). In each stand we surveyed breeding birds using fixed-radius point counts and measured for...