Living Among the Song Sparrows of Mandarte Island

From the Summer 2025 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

Seventy days. Seventy days of waking up to the faint chips of sparrows, an occasional splash or two from the transient orca pod that would grace our island, and the steady rhythm of ocean ripples on the rocks outside the tiny cabin window. Seventy days of sitting in the field, binoculars and map in hand, observing and documenting movements of Song Sparrows, becoming acquainted with each individual as if they were an old friend. For 70 days, I followed the lives of these birds, learned of their territories, watched their chicks grow, and obeyed their quiet moments of rest. What may sound like classic birdwatching is an element of something much larger—a 50-year story of survival, adaptation, and change.

The story begins with life’s tranquility and placidity on Mandarte Island, a beautiful rock just off the southeast coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island—where the days are timed with the sun, and my daily routine follows the schedules of the birds. Focused studies of the island’s Song Sparrow population began in the early 1960s by Frank Tompa through the University of British Columbia. Writing his thesis for his PhD in the Department of Zoology, Tompa was seeking to understand the factors that determined the high concentration of Song Sparrows on the island compared to neighboring islands, and the continent as a whole. His work was restarted in 1974 by UBC ornithologist Jamie N. M. Smith, and continued by Peter Arcese of the UBC Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences in the early 1990s. For every season since, under the guidance of Arcese, biologists have flocked out to the island—their presence recorded by faded photographs that hang above the wooden kitchen table in the UBC research site cabin, their initials etched into the bird-banding books.

Last summer I sailed out to the rock of Mandarte Island with my field partner, and fellow Cornell University undergraduate, Violet Brill. Our assignment was to contribute to the five-decades-and-counting dataset monitoring the island’s Song Sparrow population. Spending a field season on this sliver of idyll and contributing to the ongoing research is something that I dared to dream of as a child. My interest in birds sparked at the age of 8 years old, with a third-grade independent school project titled “Ornithology.” Now, as a Cornell junior majoring in environment and sustainability with a focus in environmental biology and applied ecology, I find my passion for ornithology is flourishing. When my professor-turned-mentor Jennifer Walsh, a researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, asked if I would be interested in completing a season of field ornithology out on Mandarte, I hastily accepted—going out on a limb and unsure of what to expect. Mandarte was my first taste of field research, and what appeared at first as nothing more than a rugged rock became a place overflowing with life and deep-rooted cultural and scientific history.

Mandarte Island, known to the W̱ SÁNEĆ people as X̱ O,X̱ DEȽ, belongs to the Tsawout and Tseycum First Nations who generously host us researchers and grant permission for our presence. Partway through the field season, I had the honor of meeting an elder of the Tsawout First Nation, STIWET. Meeting STIWET left a deep impression on me. His love for the island was unmistakable; it showed through in the careful way he walked the trails, and in the way he gently bent down to examine the blooming camas lilies, his fingers brushing their petals with care. He smiled as he shared stories of his ancestors paddling to the island in late summer, harvesting gull eggs for their meals. With him, STIWET brought along a group of students from the SENĆOŦEN Immersion Program at ȽÁU, WELṈEW̱ Tribal School. The students and I listened to STIWET’s anecdotes about traditions that used to take place on this land, such as when he pointed toward a distant cliff and recounted a ritual practiced there many years ago. As a way to escape their past and problems, young men would leap from the cliff into the ocean, clutching a heavy boulder. They held on for as long as they could beneath the surface, only letting go when they had to, emerging from the water changed, renewed.

STIWET finished by leading the students in singing a tribal song, before they all returned to their homes—leaving Brill and me alone on the island again. Their visit sparked a deeper reflection within me; I realized that my research on Mandarte is a continuation of the observations and understandings from the Tsawout ancestors who came many years before me.

My time on the island consisted of meticulously scribbling Song Sparrow movements on maps to establish territories, idly observing females slipping into their nesting sites, documenting nest activity in detail, and banding chicks for future identification. Compared to the average 169 Song Sparrow residents documented in the 1960s, the total population of Song Sparrows I studied last summer was approximately 16. Waves of researchers and years of data have shown that this fall-off in the island’s sparrow population could be due to the effects of inbreeding depression and invasions by Brown-headed Cowbirds. Each particular task of mine was designed so my data contributed to the broader understanding of the island’s long-term research, and to the further understanding of the fluctuating dynamics of this Song Sparrow population.

Friends and family often ask me questions such as, “How are you going to last spending your summer on that barren rock?” “Why study those birds if researchers have already been observing them for so long?” And, “What more is there to learn about Song Sparrows?”

Each time I answer, I can’t help but reflect on a broader issue—the lack of understanding about the value of longterm research. Long-term scientific studies often can be overshadowed by breakthroughs and discoveries, but they provide crucial context into biological systems. Without the continuity of long-term research, it would be impossible to detect slower-moving trends that only appear over time—such as the effects of inbreeding on the Song Sparrows of Mandarte that appear over several generations. Thick binders stored in the research cabin document the territory indicators of male Song Sparrows, potential nest sites, clutch sizes, and details on chick growth—a trove of observational knowledge accumulated over the past 50 years.

Other long-term research projects have likewise revealed the broader workings of ecosystems and their birds. In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, some of my Cornell undergrad peers spend their summers in the Hubbard Brook Field Ornithology program—where 56 years of data monitoring, one of the longest-running studies of migratory birds in the world, has revealed how Black-throated Blue Warblers adapt and adjust their breeding season decisions in response to environmental changes. Down in Florida, a 37-year study on Florida Scrub-Jays at the Archbold Biological Station has revealed climate patterns that wouldn’t be evident in just a few years of study, but over decades connect the dots of above-average temperatures and below-average nesting success.

So why did I sit in a field and observe the same 16 Song Sparrows all summer long?

Because any data I collect is a new addition to long-term research that aims to truly understand the adaptations, trends, differences, and persistence of this species in an ever-changing world. Long-term research helps scientists look beyond retrospective strategies and short-term fixes to environmental conflicts, and anticipate future challenges for wildlife populations—to innovate informed solutions for responding to climate change and ecological shifts.

This summer in June, I will again be exactly where I long to be—basking in the sun atop my favorite moss-covered Mandarte rock in the territory of my favorite female Song Sparrow (her leg band ID colors are green-metal-blue-orange, or GMBO, but I like to call her “Gumbo”). It’s a serene spot, where her chipping notes bounce through the salty air. When Cornell asked me if I wanted to return to Mandarte Island for another summer of field research, there was no hesitation—just an immediate, unquestionable yes. I couldn’t miss out on the opportunity to continue the research on these sparrows, contribute to their story, and be part of something far greater than myself.