Indigenous tribes and conservation biologists may have common goals and may be able to collaborate
on the maintenance of biodiversity, but few researchers have evaluated the impacts and potential
benefits of human subsistence activities. I studied the effects of subsistence activities (primarily wood collection)
of nomadic pastoralists in 3 Afromontane forests of northern Kenya. In surveys of 404, 25-m-radius
plots, I recorded vegetation structure and composition of the forest bird community. Plots with higher levels
of human activity had significantly different vegetation structure, with more-open canopies, more grass, and
fewer tree stems. Nectarivores (abundance +231%) and aerial insectivores (+66%) were more abundant
in plots with more-intense wood collecting than in plots with less human activity, whereas abundance of
forest specialists (-28%) decreased in plots with more-intense human activity. Abundance of 58% of the bird
species either increased or decreased significantly in plots with more-intense human activity. Generally, the
number of individuals of forest specialists decreased (6 of 7 species showed significant responses) and
the number of individuals of edge and nonforest species increased with increasing human activity. Canonical
correspondence analysis showed that an intensification of human activities would favor nectarivores, aerial
insectivores, granivores, and omnivores and would negatively affect large-sized, ground-foraging species and
arboreal frugivores. Subsistence human activities favored the invasion of forest by edge species at the expense
of forest specialists; thus, further intensification of forest exploitation by local peoples is not recommended. At
the same time, however, subsistence activities in northern Kenya forests appeared to increase the structural
diversity of the vegetation and provided suitable habitat for part (but not all) of the forest avifauna, which
suggests that subsistence human activities may have a role in the maintenance of bird diversity.