Just the other day I was marveling at the quality of this summer; not just the sun and heat, but the lack of wind. I blame myself for saying it out loud, but the Lesser Slave Lake area seems to have remembered that it likes being windy. The arrival of wind has certainly put a damper on migration and our banding totals over the past week. I know I have said it many times to many people that birds aren’t very active on windy days, but I also know that people are sometimes confused by that. Why birds don’t migrate when there is a headwind makes sense, but I often get asked why birds don’t take advantage of tailwinds to help them migrate faster. To a certain extent they will, but it doesn’t take much for the wind to go from helpful to dangerous. Most migratory songbirds have a cruising speed of about 30 km/hour. Our wind speeds are often 30 gusting to 50. To put it into perspective, it is like you driving down the highway with a tailwind of 100 gusting to 170. Also take into account that birds are extremely light in comparison to their surface area – so it’s like driving a tiny little car with a billboard on its roof through extreme winds. So what do birds do in the wind? Some will definitely continue to migrate, but they will do so slower and deeper in the forest, moving through the treetops in between gusts of wind. Most, however, will use poor weather as an opportunity to rest and feed so that they are ready to give it their all once the weather becomes favourable again. If the wind becomes extremely strong they often simply hunker down near the trunks on branches lower in the trees. This leads into an interesting and related topic. How do birds stay perched in such strong winds? A visitor asked the other day how birds stay so firmly attached to their perches and how they are able to sleep without falling. Birds have very specially designed legs and feet that make keeping their grip an involuntary reflex. They have long thin tendons that run along the backs of their legs attaching the muscles high in their legs all the way down to their toes. When a bird bends its legs the tendons are pulled tight over the outside/backside of their ankle joint and the toes lock onto the perch (the main joint you can see on a bird’s leg is its ankle and the main part of its ‘leg’ is actually congruent with our foot). The toes will stay locked until the bird straightens its leg and relieves the tension on the tendon. Falling asleep actually helps a bird to further tighten its grip because as it relaxes its weight settles onto its legs and causes them to bend even more which adds even more tension to the tendons.
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On November 1st, we banded our last bird of the 2026 field season. Unsurprisingly, since Owl Fall Migration Monitoring is our last monitoring program to wrap up, it was this beautiful Northern Saw-whet Owl! In total we had an above average, but not record-breaking year with 165 Northern Saw-whet Owls and 7 Boreal Owls banded. Stay tuned for our full year in review when we publish our 2026 Annual Report in early January. Missing the birds already? Join us for the 32nd Annual Slave Lake Christmas Bird Count happening on Saturday, Dec. 19th this year! Stay tuned for more information soon. Note: Birds are handled by professionals and released unharmed as permitted by federal and provincial authorities.
On Sept 13, 2026, our owl researcher Robyn Perkins banded a young female Northern Saw-whet Owl at the Boreal Centre for Bird Conservation (band 1124-61706). She was a hatch-year (hatched this spring/summer) and heading out on her first migration. We were excited to learn that she was recaptured just a month later on Oct 15, 2026 at the Rocky Point Bird Observatory in Victoria BC. Despite her young age, she crossed the Rocky Mountains and already travelled over 1300 kilometers during her first fall migration! Even more amazing, this is the second Northern Saw-whet Owl originally banded by the LSLBO (2016) and later recaptured at Rocky Point BO (2018). Thank you to Rocky Point Bird Observatory for sending us such great pictures of this little traveller.
We are thrilled to announce that Birds Canada installed a Motus Wildlife Tracking System (motus.org/) tower last week at the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory. A program of Birds Canada, Motus is an international collaborative research network that uses automated radio telemetry to track the movement and behaviour of small animals, like birds, bats, and even insects. There are almost 2500 Motus stations around the world and that number is growing every day! Motus stations are constantly listening for tiny, lightweight nanotags that have been deployed by researchers on small flying animals. When a tagged animal flies within 10 - 15 km of a tower, its unique signal can be detected and uploaded to the shared database managed by Birds Canada. If it is detected at multiple Motus stations, we can start tracking that individuals’ migratory movements. Situated on a major migratory flyway on Lesser Slave Lake, we are hoping that this Motus station will provide the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the migratory movements and habitat needs of the boreal bird species that we monitor at the LSLBO. For more information on the Motus program, check out motus.org. We would like to thank Birds Canada and Alberta Parks for all of their support for the establishment of the LSLBO Motus station!