North America's diverse Pacific Coast region extends from the Gulf of Alaska's rivers and coastline, along the rugged coasts of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California, to the rich coastlines of Baja California and western Mexico.

Alarming Declines of Birds

Pacific Coast birds are experiencing an alarming decline. Human expansion and settlement have significantly degraded the habitat of migratory birds and other wildlife along the coast. Timber harvesting has had a significant impact on avian biodiversity throughout the Pacific Coast for more than a century, both in the forests that were logged and in adjacent coastal ecosystems.

The region's wetlands have already been reduced by 90% in California and by 30% in Oregon and Washington.

Faced with the continued assault on critical bird habitat along the Pacific Coast, a day in the not too distant future can be seen when the characteristic species of the Pacific coast fall into the category of "most endangered" North American birds.

What the Conservancy is Doing

In order to protect these threatened Pacific Coast birds, the Conservancy has adopted a plan to develop and implement an integrated strategy across the range of these migratory species. This range-wide strategy promotes and facilitates collaborative relationships and projects between many government agencies and conservation organizations in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

Through its Pacific Wings program, the Conservancy seeks to link these projects based on their shared bird species and common conservation strategies.

The Pacific Wings project is working with partners to:

• improve existing conservation planning efforts at ecoregional and site levels to better reflect emerging priorities for bird conservation, specifically including a focus on protecting habitat across the entire geographic range of all appropriate species.
• provide scientific expertise, identifying new conservation opportunities not traditionally used at local and state levels and securing additional resources for conservation projects.
• protect key coastal sites from Alaska to Mexico through acquisition, easement or other means. These protected lands, complemented with the existing array of federal and state lands, will be used as core sites to influence land management over a much wider area.

A key focus of the program's protection efforts is a landscape-scale conservation centered on coastal watersheds. In these sites, both biodiversity and ecological processes are completely integrated into an interdependent system and the resident and migratory avifauna of the areas reflects this. Therefore, the complete avian biodiversity of these watershed systems along the Pacific Coast is dependent on an integrated set of conservation and management strategies.

The Conservancy's efforts are fully integrated with marine and coastal conservation, showing conclusively how linkages between different types of conservation actions can benefit a wide array of species that have traditionally been thought of as difficult to conserve.

Find out how The Nature Conservancy is working to protect migratory birds:

• Conserve the grassland birds of the Great Plains of North America
• Study climate change in the Great Plains and its effect on bird populations
• Identify and protect a network of high-quality migration stopover habitats around the Gulf of Mexico
• Examine the wintering ecology and habitat requirements of Kirtland's Warbler
• Study the Cerulean Warbler, one of the fastest declining species of migratory bird
• Delve into the Pine-Oak Forests of Central America to conserve this critical habitat for birds
• Investigate bird migration across the United States using Doppler weather radar

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Photos: Brown Pelican. Photo © D. Marotta; Royal Tern, Morro Strand State Beach, California, USA. Photo © Mike Baird (Creative Commons).