Great Blue Herons in Maine – Speaker: Danielle D’Auria

Phote Credit _SherrieTucker
Speaker: Danielle D’Auria
Did you ever wonder where Maine’s Great Blue Herons go in winter, and what path they travel to get there? Since 2016, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife has deployed lightweight GPS tracking
devices on Great Blue Herons to follow their movements during nesting, migration, and wintering. This technology has revealed impressive migrations sometimes over long stretches of open ocean and for over
60 hours non-stop to Florida, the Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti! Hear all about these majestic birds, how over 100 volunteers have been monitoring their colonies for the past 14 years, and how students are integral to tracking their movements within and beyond state lines. Danielle D’Auria is Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s species expert on secretive marsh birds, colonial wading birds, common loons, and black terns. Her work focuses on understanding statewide populations of these species as well as land management issues affecting the wetland habitats they depend on. Over the past 14 years, she has devoted a great deal of effort to heron surveys and research, including coordination of a volunteer monitoring program called the Heron Observation Network of Maine and has used GPS transmitters to track great blue herons during breeding, migration, and wintering.