All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. 2015. Accessed August 2015. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/search/. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology uses this sight as an online guide to North American Birds. I primarily used this guide to learn and check bird’s calls. This sight has various recording of different birds. If a bird species has a diverse range of sounds, the site will often include multiple types of different calls. I used birdcall knowledge to identify different species, and to find them. This site helped me to learn them, and to check ones that I had heard but could not identify. It also provided images for visual identification information, which I also used for identification.
Bull, John, and John Farrand, Jr. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds. Eastern Region. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. I used this book for a more realistic view of what different bird species look like because it was a photographed field guide as opposed to an illustrated one. It gave me a better idea of what birds looked like. The information on the bird’s habits was also more extensive in this field guide. It specifies the birds of the eastern U.S., which is where the survey is taking place. For some species, it shows photographs of varying plumages, which is helpful, but it doesn’t do this very extensively. This is why I sometimes had to rely on other guides.
Contosta, David R., and Carol Franklin. Metropolitan Paradise: The Struggle for Nature in the City: Philadelphia's Wissahickon Valley, 1620-2020. Vol. 3 and 4. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press, 2010. These are the more modern volumes of a collection of books about the history of the Wissahickon valley. These two particular volumes discuss the more modern aspects of the park.They both discuss the recent meadow restoration projects, and the migratory birds that are found in the park. This series provided some background knowledge as to why these meadows are such important ecosystems, which is what my project is trying to proove. These books discussed how and why the meadow restorations took place, and the effects of the process. The series provided some background information on what the meadows were like before the restoration took place.
Dunne, Pete, David Sibley, and Clay Sutton. Hawks in Flight: The Flight Identification of North American Migrant Raptors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. This book is a field guide to North American Raptors. It specifies in identifying them while they are high up in the air. The field guides I used served a sufficient guide to raptors in trees or at ground level, but most of the time when they were observed in the project, they were higher up. This book helped me to identify raptors when they were far away. It helped me with the identification of this specific type of bird that was often seen during the study. It also helped me to tell the age and sex of the raptors.
Francis, Peter, and David Burnie. Bird: The Definitive Visual Guide. New York: DK Pub., 2007. This book is a visual guide to birds of the world. Although the project only focuses on birds of the Philadelphia area, this book does cover a number of these specific species. Since the guide shows species range maps, it could be used to determine if a species is found in the study area. It provided information on these species. This book offered more extensive information on certain species than an identification field guide would have. For the species I could find, this book that applied to the project, this book was a valuable resource to find out additional facts about these species.
Fries, Trish. "Andorra Meadows: Any Time, Any Season." Friends of the Wissahickon, November 2, 2007. Accessed February 4, 2016. This article discusses the biodiversity of Andorra meadow in the Wissahickon, one of the two meadows surveyed in this project. It not only discusses the bird species that utilize it, but also the mammal species, which share this ecosystem with the birds, and affect them. My project requires the understanding of the entire meadow ecosystem in order to ascertain how it affects migratory birds. This article was written after the restoration of the Andorra natural area, and shows how the restoration has helped the meadow ecosystem and its biodiversity. It shows the importance of this meadow area to the biosphere.
Leroy, Ken. "Houston Meadows, A Wissahickon Gem." Friends of the Wissahickon, November 2, 2007. Accessed February 4, 2016. This article discusses the restoration of Houston meadow. It shows how the meadow restoration has helped this ecosystem, and its wildlife. The meadow offers a habitat for many bird and mammal species, and these coexist. a understanding of the overall ecosystem helped to understand why migrating and nesting birds utilize it. This article shows the importance of this ecosystem to bird migrations and habitat. It discusses some of the species that are endemic to this meadow. The restoration project has increased the number of species that rely on more open meadow habitats. Many birds have also begun nesting in the area.
Sibley, David Allen. The Sibley Guide to Birds. 2nd ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. The Sibley Guide is an illustration visual Field Guide to birds of North America. It offers depictions of birds in various plumages, based on age, sex, region, and time of year. It covers basically every North American Bird species, including many exotic invasive, and occasional vagrant migrants. The illustrations are very scientifically accurate, and the guide points out certain indicative features in certain species. This guide has allowed me to not only identify bird species found in the field, but also in many cases, to determine sex and age of the specific bird, which is data that I am collecting.
Tryjanowski, Piotr, Tim H. Sparks, Stanislaw Kuźniak, Pawel Czechowski, and Leszek Jerzak. "Bird Migration Advances More Strongly in Urban Environments." Journalplos.org, May 8, 2013. Accessed February 4, 2016. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063482. This was a study on bird migrations in urban areas. The study consisted of migratory bird population data in different urban environments. It should the growing trend of migratory bird populations in urban areas increasing. This is relevant to my project because the Wissahickon is in a city, and the birds passing through its meadows are passing through an urban area. The number of birds migrating through these urban meadows is increasing, and this study proves that trend. My survey is an example of an urban habitat aiding this increasing migratory bird population trend. This is the type of science that my survey was designed for.
Witmer, Tom. "A Wissahickon Valley Gem." Montgomery Media, October 13, 2009. Accessed February 4, 2016. http://www.montgomerynews.com/articles/2009/10/13/roxborough_review/news/doc4ad4bc6e31b21757692336.txt. This article discusses Houston meadow in the Wissahickon. It discusses the specifics of this meadow, as well as the ecological importance of meadows in general. It provides a background on the meadow ecosystem, and its importance to birds and other wildlife. This provides me with a further background knowledge as to why these meadows are important for birds in the Philadelphia area. It shows how these habitats provide a home for nesting birds and a resting place for migrants. It enhances the importance of the survey because the data I collect emphasizes the importance of the meadows in the Wissahickon.