Oil and gas well infrastructure has a major effect on grassland songbirds in southern Alberta, a doctoral thesis indicates.
Jody Daniel-Simon recently completed a study in the Brooks, Alta., region that indicates energy industry infrastructure has a cumulative effect on songbird behaviour, likely reducing their numbers.
She estimates a 70 percent decline in the number of grassland songbirds in recent years within southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan. Results of a major study of songbirds released last year by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology indicated North America has lost an estimated three billion birds since 1970, many of them from grasslands.
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“Grasslands in particular posted the biggest losses, with more than 700 million breeding individuals lost across 31 species since 1970, a more than 50 percent decline,” said a story on the study published in Audubon.
Daniel-Simon said adverse effects on habitat where the songbirds breed and nest is thought to have a greater impact on numbers than changes elsewhere in the birds’ migration or life cycle.
In a May 19 talk organized through the Saskatchewan branch of the Prairie Conservation Action Plan, Daniel-Simon said oil and gas companies could mitigate adverse effects on birds by avoiding above-ground infrastructure as much as possible.
She noted that in her study area, there are as many as 16 gas wells per section, a far higher density than oil wells and pump jacks. If companies could access natural gas from a single well head and consider location of new wells with habitat in mind, it could improve the situation for grassland species.
Gas wells, oil wells and roads were the main considerations regarding energy infrastructure in her study. Each of them generates noise, which can affect birds’ ability to communicate.
Oil and gas installations can also disrupt soil and introduce different grass and weed species not suited to bird habitat, she added. Roads and trails are needed to access the wells, which have the effect of bisecting habitat.
“Roads by themselves do have impact on grassland songbirds,” said Daniel-Simon.
“What happens along these areas where you have fragmentation along roads is that predators often use them to find food and … for this reason we typically see that birds that may be forced to exist near roads are more vulnerable to predation and also some birds may avoid roads for that simple reason.”
She limited the study to a few species of grassland birds, including the savannah sparrow, vesper sparrow, Sprague’s pipit, chestnut-collared longspur and western meadowlark.
In general, the number of birds, nests, eggs and successful fledglings were lower as proximity to infrastructure increased. Daniel-Simon said the physical presence of the infrastructure seemed to have a greater influence than the noise produced.
