At the fall meeting of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) held in Ottawa, only one bird species was assessed – the Yellow-breasted Chat. Under the federal Species at Risk Act, COSEWIC is required to reassess the status of species every 10 years. Hence, the chat assessment was a reassessment of the three recognized populations that occur in Canada.
Photo © BSC
COSEWIC upheld its earlier decisions on the status of the western “auricollis” subspecies of Yellow-breasted Chat in the Southern Mountain region of southern British Columbia (Endangered) and in the Prairies region of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan (Not at Risk). However, since the last assessment, the situation has worsened for the eastern “virens” subspecies in southern Ontario.
Ten years earlier, this subspecies met COSEWIC’s criteria for Threatened, but had been assessed as Special Concern, because it was believed that the Canadian population could be “rescued” by populations in the northeastern United States. Since then, however, the chat’s breeding range has been dramatically contracting across much of the northeast, and the Ontario population has continued to decline.
The Yellow-breasted Chat requires fairly large patches of early-successional, dense shrubby habitat, which is becoming increasingly rare in southwestern Ontario. “Owing to its habitat specificity, small and declining population size, and diminished prospects for population rescue from the U.S., the outlook for this species is quite bleak,” said Jon McCracken, Bird Studies Canada’s Director of National Programs and co-chair of COSEWIC’s Bird Species Specialist Committee.
Check out the COSEWIC website to learn more about the other 21 species of wildlife assessed at the meeting.