Comparing Historical and Contemporary Observations of Avian Fauna on the Yáláƛi (Goose Island) Archipelago, British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

In an era of global change, historical natural history data can improve our understanding of ecological phenomena, particularly when evaluated with contemporary Indigenous and place-based knowledge. The Yáláƛi (Goose Island) Archipelago is a group of islands in Heiltsuk (Haíɫzaqv) territory on the Central Coast of British Columbia, Canada. Not only has this region been important to the Heiltsuk for millennia but also it is both a federally and internationally recognized important bird area. In this study, we compare data collected by Charles J. Guiguet, a biologist who documented bird communities at Yáláƛi in the summer of 1948, to three different contemporary surveys and to citizen-science data. We find that the relative abundances of forest bird species (i.e., birds that use the terrestrial island ecosystems) in 1948 differed to those observed in systematic surveys in 2011. While Orange-crowned Warblers, Dark-eyed Juncos, and Red Crossbills comprised 55% of detections by Guiguet in 1948, the three most abundant species in 2011 were Bald Eagles, Varied Thrushes, and Pacific Wrens, and these accounted for only 25% of detections. Although we could not make a quantitative comparison, we provide summaries of each species observed in surveys or reported on eBird. We also incorporate Heiltsuk place-based knowledge to enrich our discussion of the variability in bird communities over time, from how changes in mammal communities and human use may have shaped vegetation dynamics to how large-scale natural phenomena impacted topography. To understand which birds are present and how their communities are changing over time, we recommend continued monitoring of the bird communities at Yáláƛi.