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Archived Postings

July 2, 2009 – July 8, 2009

The past week was very quiet at the LSLBO. Some would say it was the calm before the storm. With some down time between scheduled banding visits to the breeding sites and the young fledged from all the Canada warbler nests, there was little bird monitoring that needed to be done. So instead our time was spent preparing for the busiest time of year. The busiest time of year at the banding station is bittersweet. It’s great because we return to the lab for daily monitoring and banding. It’s a little depressing because it is the start of fall migration. Fall migration monitoring officially begins at the LSLBO on July 12. We will be out counting songbirds as they start their long trip south every day until the end of September. Fall monitoring begins before any major migration takes place. Starting earlier allows us to document the full migratory window for most of the species expected to pass through on their way south. Noticeable migration likely won’t begin until the third week of July. It’s at that point where banding can quickly become very busy. A flock of birds can hit any net at any time. We are expecting days where you approach a net which has just captured 50 birds. Then banding becomes hectic and stressful. Not only do we potentially face a large volume of birds, but fall migration has other challenges. One of the challenges is that the birds will be wearing their fall plumages. This mostly applies to males that have striking breeding plumages. That plumage is lost and replaced with drabber coloured feathers, making the males look almost identical to females. Young birds still baring their juvenile plumage is another challenge. These plumages often lack any distinctive markings. At that point we use biometrics. We measure wings, tails, beaks, and individual feathers to try to narrow down the species. To make the situation more complicated, banding on the breeding grounds has not finished. In fact, it’s only half way done. Although some birds are finished nesting, the adults are still involved with their post-fledgling care duties until their offspring are capable of looking after themselves. Some birds still have young in their nests and will take some time before they are ready to face the large world on their own. Monitoring breeding productivity requires that most nesting is completed and that sampling occurs while the young are actively flying about. What this means for us is that the breeding program and fall migration overlap. There are days where both programs are running, and we basically double the number of nets we would normally have open. Yup, it’s a busy time of year. But bring on the birds, because we are ready to band a pile of birds over the next 12 weeks. That’s how we like it.

2010