Clearcut with seed trees in red pine forests associated with increased occupancy by Eastern Whip-poor-wills

[Display omitted] •Early-successional forests are declining in parts of northeastern North America.•Eastern Whip-poor-wills and other early-successional species are also declining.•Occupancy by Eastern Whip-poor-wills is associated with clearcuts in red pine stands.•Clearcuts may enhance visual foraging success via backlighting on moonlit nights. Forest management is often used to increase and maintain early-successional forest habitat for breeding birds by emulating natural disturbance with harvesting. However, quantified habitat-use relationships are often lacking, which makes forest management planning challenging for some species. One such species is the Eastern Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vociferus), a crepuscular, insectivorous, neotropical, migrant bird, designated as a species at risk throughout most of its breeding range. Thus, we determined occupancy of Eastern Whip-poor-wills at 37 sampling points in red pine (Pinus resinosa)-dominated stands harvested using clearcut with seed trees and in white pine (P. strobus)-dominated stands harvested using uniform shelterwood in June 2013 in eastern Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario. In red pine stands, we found that model-predicted site occupancy increased by 3.3 times from 0.23 where young (