The Western Maryland RC&D partners with Maryland DNR Wildlife & Heritage to employ Gabriel Foley in the role of Maryland Breeding Bird Atlas Coordinator. In this role, Gabriel and the Maryland & DC Breeding Bird Atlas 3 had a remarkably successful first year in 2020. This five year project is documenting the distribution, abundance, and timing of every bird species that nests in Maryland and DC. Despite a pandemic that prevented any group outings, limited how far participants could travel, and imposed mask wearing that inevitably fogged binoculars, observers submitted well over a million individual observations of birds to the Atlas database. Over 250,000 of those birds exhibited some form of breeding behavior nearly as many individual breeding records as both previous atlases combined. Over 900 observers spent 38,000 hours searching for breeding birds over half the effort recorded by the previous atlas and managed to cover 96% of the region. Observers documented over 200 species breeding across the region, including four species that had never been recorded by a previous atlas. The Mississippi Kite a steel gray, red eyed hawk was found at a nest in Calvert County. Rusty brown, long legged Sandhill Cranes were found with chicks in Garrett County and Merlins , a diminutive but ferocious falcon, were found nesting in Garrett and Allegany Counties. Finally, a pair of White Ibis red faced herons with curved bills were photographed with chicks in their nest on a Somerset County island.
The year round diligence of atlasers also reset a number of nest records. The nests of a dozen species were found earlier than ever previously found in Maryland or DC, and three species had nests found later than ever recorded. The project’s importance to conservation in Maryland was recognized with a Governor’s Citation. In September, Atlas Coordinator Gabriel Foley met with Lieutenant Governor Boyd Rutherford and DNR Secretary Jeannie Haddaway
Riccio and accepted the citation on behalf of all atlasers .