• Drury, William H.
  
• Folger, David
  
• Conover, Garrett
  

The public in Maine will no longer acquiesce to spraying pesticides on a major percentage of the forest area of northern Maine without searching analysis and justification. In response to this, the Bureau of Forestry commissioned a study of regional populations of songbirds, as one of the studies needed to monitor effects on wildlife.

We used techniques developed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for assessing large-scale, long-term population trends in birds. Two observers stopped at every half mile along twenty-three transects of 20 miles each. At each stop the observers recorded all birds heard or seen during three minutes. We discuss the advantages and limitations of the technique and the major alternative.

Because virtually all the areas of northern Maine in which spruce and fir are the dominant trees were sprayed and all the unsprayed areas were vegetated with hardwoods, our program lacked valid controls against which to compare our data from sprayed areas. We found no differences between the songbird populations along 300 miles of transects in sprayed areas and those along 160 miles of transects in unsprayed areas.