UNE’s Noah Perlut receives Audubon Toyota TogetherGreen Innovation Grant to reverse decline of Vermont’s bobolink population

Noah Perlut, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of New England, recently received a grant of over $36,000 to carry out a project in the summer of 2015 to engage Vermont land owners and managers in ways that will balance farming practices with the needs of bobolinks, a species of grassland bird. This project is supported by Audubon Toyota TogetherGreen, an Audubon program with funding from Toyota.

Perlut’s previous research regarding the impact of agricultural grassland management on the reproduction of grassland birds led to the identification of alternative land management practices for hay lands and pastures that enable farmers to meet their management objectives while facilitating reproductive success among the birds living in their fields.

Perlut’s partner in this work, however, the Natural Resource Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has not been able to enroll new landowners due to a lack of human power to communicate their programs. Therefore, while effective management programs exist, education and outreach are lacking.

Perlut’s grant will fund a new project in which he and University of New England students will partner with volunteer members of the Green Mountain Audubon Society to search for bobolinks that were previously banded with devices that track their annual migration. They will scour a 10km landscape that includes the plots of more than 40 private grassland owners in Vermont. The goal is to learn more about the birds’ life histories and then to communicate these histories to the landowners in whose fields the birds live.

According to Perlut, "the best way to increase awareness and conservation is by telling the stories of individual birds -- where they were born, where they migrated, and their breeding success -- to the landowners."

"These are the people that can most directly affect the future of this species in Vermont," he explained.

Perlut’s project facilitates collaboration among diverse audiences in order to address a pressing conservation problem -- the aim of the Toyota TogetherGreen Innovation Grant. Perlut commented, "I am incredibly excited about the opportunity to link so many communities—researchers, students, Audubon volunteers, land owners and land managers—to reverse the declining population trend of the charismatic bobolink. These species will simply disappear if we fail to work together as a community."

In addition to funding the project, the grant will provide Perlut the opportunity to attend a professional development workshop at the Arbor Day Foundation’s Lied Lodge where he will meet with other grantees and take part in sessions focused on conservation planning, evaluation, fundraising, and outreach.

Audubon Toyota TogetherGreen, a conservation initiative of the National Audubon Society and Toyota, founded in 2008, fosters and invests in conservation pioneers and ideas that impact the environment on a national scale.