A Kentucky nonprofit has enhanced a popular trail along Pine Mountain, hoping to attract birdwatchers and help conservation efforts.
The Kentucky Natural Lands Trust, which works to conserve the state’s wildlands, has created six hotspots along the trail for hikers to catalog birds, from Pineville to Bad Branch Falls.
The trust is partnering with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its eBird app. It lets users identify and log birds they encounter along the trail. Signs with QR codes have been installed at those hotspots, allowing visitors to directly reach the app.
The crowdsourced app helps scientists establish migration patterns. Last year, the trust received a $10,000 grant from Cornell Labs to create the trail.
“What this does for citizen science is establishes migration patterns, breeding ground patterns for these species, which is really really significant for their conservation, actually,” said Joe Manning, the trust’s communications director.
Pine Mountain is 125 miles long and goes through Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia.
According to the group, more than 200 unique species fly through Central Appalachia each year, with about half labeled as priority species for conservation. Around 700 million birds will fly across Kentucky during this year’s fall migration season.
“It's also by default very remote, right? So while we know that is one of the most important migratory flyways in North America, there are not a lot of ways to actually track discrete species as they move through," Manning said.
The trail has opened as birdwatching as a hobby grows in popularity. In Great Britain, the amount of Gen Z birdwatchers has risen 1,088% since 2018, from around 61,000 to 724,000, according to a Fifty5Blue study. In 2022, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported 96 million active birdwatchers stateside.
The Kentucky Natural Lands Trust is hosting a guided tour of the bird trail Oct. 3. Registration is available online.
