Selecting survey points is a critical component of the project. Please keep the following guidelines in mind when doing so. First, the points must be in appropriate breeding habitat for your target species. Check the species accounts section to verify this. Second, make sure your patches are the appropriate height -- no less than 20 feet (6 meters) tall.

You may establish as many or as few survey points as you like. Because an objective of BFL is to assess breeding success in small forest patches (less than 25 acres or 10 hectares), we encourage you to give these areas high priority.

Follow these three steps to select survey points:

1. Select Forest Patches
2. Identify Survey Points
3. Delineate Study Sites

And don't forget, always ask the landowner for permission on private land.

The following steps will help you choose appropriate patches for your study.

1. Determine suitable habitat for your selected study species, using the species accounts.

2. Select as many or as few forest patches as you like. Please do not select forest patches where you know your study species are breeding this season. This will bias the data. However, you may choose patches where your study species have been casually observed in the past.

To locate forest patches, use topographic maps, aerial photographs (see Map Resources) or conduct surveys of the region by foot or car. Look for discrete islands of forest surrounded by non-forest habitat. We prefer that the sites be mostly forested, but in some situations, such as small woodlots, riparian strips, or areas only reachable by car, having some non-forest is permissible (see Figure 1 for examples). Also, BFL defines forest patches connected by corridors as "continuous forest," not discrete patches. Data from these areas are useful to the project.

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Identify Survey Points

In each forest patch, select one or more survey points where you will conduct the BFL survey protocol. Please observe the follwing criteria when selecting your survey points:

1. Try to pick points that are representative of the habitat in the entire site.

2. Each point must be inside the forest patch but can be any distance from the edge.

3. Points must be 1000 feet apart (300 meter) for most birds and 3000 feet apart (900 meters) for any of the hawks.

4. Try to spread your survey points over several forest patches.

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Each survey point you have identified and marked will become the center of a 500-foot-radius (150-meter) circular study site (see Figure 1, below). All of your surveying and subsequent observation of breeding behaviors will take place within this study site, and you will describe various characteristics of the vegetation within the circle. You may want to pace out 500 feet (150 meters) from the survey point to get a feel for the size of this circle. You should mark with flagging the periphery of the circle, 500 feet (150 meters) from the center point, to delineate the boundaries of the study site.