Sometimes it feels like it is all a numbers game. It is, sort of, technically… Our purpose, after all, is coming up with daily totals of each bird species we encounter so we can derive trends to determine if their populations are stable or not. But lately, it is feeling like instead of just recording numbers, we are fixating on them and comparing them with other numbers. We just banded our 200th bird of the season on May 21, normally by this time of the year we would be looking at a total of around 700 birds. Although this seems alarming it is not necessarily a concern, there are lots of things that affect arrival dates of birds as well as whether or not they do the bulk of their migrating during the night or during the day. This is the reason for long-term monitoring, by itself a bad year can look terrible, but when it is plotted on a graph with all the other years and a trend line is added, the natural fluctuations are accounted for. Having said all that, it can be hard not to fixate and fret on that low, low number (what else are we going to do while we wile away the hours spent not catching birds?). Eventually with all this fixating we graduate to comparing: playing ‘keeping up with the Jones’ with other banding stations. There are quite a few monitoring and banding stations across Canada; some are just casual banding sites associated with universities or research projects, but some, like our station, focus on long-term monitoring and follow very strict protocols and are part of the Canadian Migration Monitoring Network. There are 25 stations in the CMMN and I hate to say it, but we are near the bottom as far as capture rates go. Some of the stations out east along the Great Lakes can catch more birds in a day than we catch in an entire year. I think banding 150 birds is a very busy day, I blanch at the idea of their busy days which can exceed a thousand birds. Then I remember that they have 20-30 trained volunteers there on any given day. I also must remind myself that they are situated on the southern-most point of Canada; a tiny spit of land that extends down into Lake Erie. For birds travelling north over the lake it is the first place to land after hours of hazardous flight over water. If recalling these facts don’t help me feel better about our station’s comparative totals, I turn to comparing us to other Albertan stations. There are two other CMMN stations in Alberta, one is near Tofield (Beaverhill Bird Observatory – Fun Fact: this is where bander-in-charge, Richard began his banding career) and the other is in Calgary (Inglewood Bird Observatory). Compared with them, we are not so shabby at all, and I can begin to look past the overall numbers and remember the most important thing, that each bird we band is more than a number. It is a wild animal and I count myself lucky that I get to experience it up close.
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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!