Birdies helping birdies

Mark Johnson

Editor’s note: Inside Your Environment periodically presents information being featured or archived on The Environmental Institute for Golf Web site. For more about this month’s topic, visit www.eifg.org.

The National Audubon Society reports that the average populations of common birds have dropped 68 percent since 1967, with the population of some individual species falling by as much as 80 percent. The culprit? According to the NAS, a loss of habitat and changes in agricultural practices shoulder much of the blame.

Much of that habitat has been lost to development in this country, development that includes golf courses. And although GCSAA’s Golf Course Environmental Profile Survey revealed that golf courses occupy just over 2 million acres of land, or about 2 percent of the 108 million acres of developed land reported in 2003 by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, golf’s playing fields offer a unique opportunity for the re-establishment of bird habitats.

Take the story of Wes Leith, CGCS, and the team at Wildhorse Golf Course in Davis, Calif., which has worked with various community groups, including school children, to build habitat for burrowing owls at their facility, an effort highlighted this month in Green Links on The Environmental Institute for Golf’s Web site at www.eifg.org.

In the case study, “Creating Artificial Mounds for Burrowing Owls,” the six-year GCSAA member writes about the successes of this program and the recognition his team’s efforts have elicited from the general public.

“The community is also supportive of the effort being made by the golf course and the city to preserve these natural treasures. Stories have appeared in the Sacramento Bee, Davis Enterprise and the Woodland Democrat. Field trips of the golf course and owl habitat have been given to a range of parties, including Tafoya Elementary School, Burrowing Owl Preservation Society guests and the University of California-Davis turf management class,” Leith says. “It is a common sight to see community members on the walk path surrounding the course taking pictures or using binoculars to spot the owls.”

The recognition that golf courses can be suitable locations for the re-establishment of bird habitats goes beyond the golf course management industry. In the book “Urban Wildlife Management,” authors Clark Adams, Kieran Lindsay and Sara Ash write about managed habitat patches (MHPs), which are defined as sites under direct and intense management by humans. Examples of urban /suburban MHPs include cemeteries, parks, golf courses and residential yards, and the book explains that those areas are capable of holding “rich avian diversity.”

Max Terman, Ph.D. at Tabor College in Hillsboro, Kan., also broached the subject in a project he wrote about in the pages of the USGA Green Section Record in 1996. The story — “The Bird Communities of Prairie Dunes Country Club and Sand Hills State Park” — studied bird populations between the golf course and a native area. “Is it worthwhile to include natural habitat areas on golf courses?” Terman wrote. “If providing a home for a significant number of birds is important, the answer is yes.

“With the alarming declines in the populations of some wild birds,” he continued, “there is a need to incorporate more wildlife habitat into human landscapes such as golf courses.”

Mark Johnson is GCSAA’s environmental programs specialist.