Posts By: corik

This will be my final article for the year; as much as I hate to admit it, owl migration is over. During the first half of the week I caught a couple owls a night, and was feeling hopeful that they would continue moving right until the end of October, but then over the last… Read more »

I am writing my article tonight while I am out owl banding. Not going to lie, I am kind of hoping that I will provoke Murphy’s Law by assuming that it will be slow enough for me to get this done on time, thus making it crazy busy. Over the past two weeks it has… Read more »

Traditionally I always stop writing weekly articles once songbird migration ends. The simple reason for this is that without songbird migration I have very little writing fodder – I can only write so much about the owl monitoring program. Although I find owl banding enjoyable it is rather predictable; except on very rare occasions all… Read more »

Well it is official, fall migration has blown away, literally; the last few days of monitoring were some of the windiest we have seen all season. Unfortunately the windy days prevented us from being able to get the nets open as often as we should have been able to so we didn’t quite hit the… Read more »

This week was a little different – bird-wise everything was very similar to last week – the chickadees and myrtle warblers were still migrating in throngs and American tree sparrows and slate coloured juncos continued to slowly gain in number, but then on the weekend there was something missing at the observatory… Us. In the… Read more »

This past week really typified what I always say about our station: the LSLBO is all or nothing. Many other stations are predictable in their levels of bird activity and have consistent day-to-day banding totals; not us, there is absolutely no predicting whether or not we will be busy. Some days we may count thousands… Read more »

It has been an interesting week. With the exception of one absolutely gorgeous day it has been mostly cold, frosty and windy. Despite rather miserable weather bird activity has remained steady. Myrtle warblers are still pouring out of the northern forests by the thousands and mixed in with them are lots of orange-crowned warblers, blackpoll… Read more »

Raptors are cool, and I am not talking about the prehistoric ones made famous by Jurassic Park (although they are plenty cool), but rather the modern day ones – the birds of prey. September is a great month for raptors in many ways: it is the start of saw-whet owl banding, it is the peak… Read more »

The trees are turning colours, the breeze is getting nippy, and the air has that amazing smell that can only mean one thing… Autumn is here. Fall migration monitoring may have started over a month ago, but it has only really started to feel like fall this past week. Plants and weather aside, there have… Read more »

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… Read more »