Among the 240 bird species that have been recorded in the Sleeping Bear Dunes area, about 169 of them (70%) nest and raise young here each year. Birds are perhaps the most visible of all the park’s wildlife. They fill the morning with song and the trees with color. This is the only one of the nine network parks where we find Upland Sandpipers, and it’s one of only two parks in our network with Prairie Warblers.
Something so important deserves care, so each year in June, we set out before sunrise to spend our mornings doing songbird surveys at 41 points scattered throughout the national lakeshore. We recently analyzed the data collected during surveys from 2014 through 2018 to see how songbird populations are doing.
Source: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service
