{"id":940,"date":"2010-09-09T15:47:20","date_gmt":"2010-09-09T22:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.unbc.ca\/~aleza\/?p=940"},"modified":"2010-09-09T15:47:20","modified_gmt":"2010-09-09T22:47:20","slug":"are-moose-creating-bird-habitat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/?p=940","title":{"rendered":"Are Moose Creating Bird Habitat?"},"content":{"rendered":"

ALRF staff and a group of UNBC students were visiting a \u00a0 teaching site in a shelterwood harvest \u00a0treatment in late August when someone noticed a bird nest located in a short but very branchy birch tree. The site has been actively browsed by moose ever since the 18 ha block was harvested in winter 1994\/95. The browse in this area was so extensive that the moose \u00a0were basically controlling the brush, making room for the planted spruce to \u00a0grow in the understory.
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\nWe know from a recent pilot study at \u00a0ALRF \u00a0that when moose browse the new \u00a0shoots \u00a0off \u00a0birch saplings, \u00a0the tree responds by sprouting more shoots, which encourages more browsing, which promotes more shoot growth, and so on, resulting in a very unusual \u00a0tree morphology or shape.<\/p>\n

Apparently some types of nesting birds also find this moose\/birch browsing and growing cycle very beneficial as well! According to Plants of Northern British Columbia (MacKinnon, Pojar & Coupe), the lichen species \u00a0used to construct this nest indicate either warbler \u00a0or vireo bird species.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Located about 1m off the ground, a bird's nest was tucked in between the multple stems of this birch sapling. The tree had been impacted by several seasons of moose browse.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The nest was roughly 10 cm in diameter and was assembled with small sticks and horsehair lichen (Bryoria species) and common witch's hair lichen (Alectoria species).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ALRF staff and a group of UNBC students were visiting a \u00a0 teaching site in a shelterwood harvest \u00a0treatment in late August when someone noticed a bird nest located in a short but very branchy birch tree. The site has been actively browsed by moose ever since the 18 ha block was harvested in winter … <\/p>\n

Read more “Are Moose Creating Bird Habitat?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-research-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alrf.unbc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}