In The Singing Wilderness, author Sigurd Olson writes about loon song and the “high calling of birds" during migration.
“I have discovered that I am not alone in my listening; that almost everyone is listening for something, that the search for places where the singing may be heard goes on everywhere."
It’s true, and the things we listen for are intangible and as real as the birds who fill the days with song. It is those birds that we listen for each June as we conduct annual songbird surveys at 60 different points across the park.
The National Park Service has monitored songbird populations at Voyageurs since 1995. More than 100 species of songbirds have been documented here, many of them, such as the Canada Jay and the White-throated Sparrow, representative of the conifer forests that extend from here to the Arctic. 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
