Name: Brooke Benoit Date: September 4, 2013 Class: Principles of Wildlife Management Title: Carrying Capacity of Kirtlands Warbler

In 1967 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Kirtlands warbler as a endangered species. By 1971 only 200 male Kirtland warblers were left. To have the species repopulate Michigan and the surrounding area scientist needed to remove the obstacles that were preventing the Kirtland warbler from having a stable population. They first had to deal with the principle wildlife management is NOT just wildlife management (Strong). This was important because the Brown Headed Cow Bird is a parasitic species; meaning it lays it egg in other species nest (including the Kirtland warbler) and most often will remove the host egg. The Cowbird egg grows at a faster rate that all the other eggs in the nest and will hatch much earlier than the host eggs. The cowbird chicks are bigger and claim more food than the host chicks, causing the other chicks to die. So the scientist created a way to catch the cowbirds and then kill them by thoracic compression. While scientists thought this would help the population rebound it did not. This is when the scientists found that the biological carrying capacity was very low because the Kirtland warbler requires small jack pines for nesting and there were not very many left in the area. So in order to increase the Kirtland warbler population there needed to be more of the small jack pines. The small jack pine require fire to spread its seeds and the human prevention of forest fires has prevented these young trees from occurring. So the scientists began to set fires in designated areas that covered over 200 acres and about six years after, they began to see the Kirtland warbler population rebound to almost 4,000 birds. However in the process of burning the 200 acres a man lost his

life which sparked the discussion of is it worth it to save one species. Many people believed that the species would naturally have gone extinct anyway from the cowbirds even without human alterations to their territories. This is why the social carrying capacity is sometimes even more important than the biological carrying capacity. After the man died in the fire trying to save the species the public opinion in the town went down drastically. However because there were people all over the United States and the world that wanted to save the species conservation efforts continue yearly with cost of around 1 million dollars. Now every year people from all over the world go to Michigan to do a warbler count to study the populations of warbler from year to year. It is these people who have protected the Kirtland Warbler and is why the social carrying capacity is so important to .