Can cut-out decoys draw lovelorn larks to new digs? Perhaps some lark love songs would help? We’re using some interesting techniques to find out.

The streaked horned lark lives on large treeless areas in Western Washington and Oregon, including prairies in the south Puget Sound, coastal beaches, islands in the lower Columbia River and farms in the Willamette Valley.

Larks in Trouble

But these rare birds have lost habitat and the population is dropping. In some areas the species may be declining by as much as 40 percent per year. They are a federal candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act and are listed as endangered in Washington.

A small population of larks is living in an industrial site in north Portland. Adjacent to this site, which is slated for development, there’s another large, open grassy expanse, a former landfill, which Portland Metro and its partners are restoring as lark habitat. Our challenge is to entice the larks to move to their new digs!

Decoys and Love Songs

That’s where the decoys and the love songs come in. To create the decoys, a Conservancy AmeriCorps intern, Alessa Lopez, drew a colored pencil image of a streaked horned lark, which was printed on Rite-in-the-Rain labels. The wooden lark-shaped cutouts upon which the image was affixed were handcrafted by Trevor Donnelly of Trevor's Wood-Working, an Olympia-based company.

Portland Metro staff are deploying decoys and playing back recordings of lark songs in the area where they want the larks to begin nesting.

In addition to Portland Metro and the Conservancy, other partners in the lark-attraction project are the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Oregon State University. These partnerships have been nurtured through a program promoting ecoregional cooperative conservation, implemented by the Conservancy and funded by the Department of Defense Legacy program.

Cooperative Conservation

The Cooperative Conservation project aims to strengthen the lark population so that it will not have to be listed as endangered.

Beginning in 2007, the Cooperative Conservation project held a workshop about the streaked horned lark, and continues to hold bi-annual working group meetings for the rare bird.  Since that time the scope and intensity of streaked horned lark conservation efforts and the number of partners engaged on lark conservation have increased dramatically.

The Cooperative Conservation project is a model that can be implemented for any species or conservation issue. Through cooperation, we can achieve much greater conservation than by each organization working in isolation.

Nature picture credits (left to right): Photo © TNC (Prairie Habitat); Photo © TNC (lark decoys on sticks); Photo © WDFW (streaked horned lark).