Posts By: Nicole Linfoot

This week out at the observatory has been fairly unremarkable; it hasn’t been bad by any means, just not particularly remarkable. We have been banding around 30-40 birds a day and have just passed the 900 mark for our banding total. Overhead migration is still consistently heavy during the first half of the morning as… Read more »

This week has been all about diversity; although we experienced a lot of poor weather early in the week we have still been seeing and catching a fair number of birds of an impressive number of species. Our total number of species banded climbed by five species to 40. This is because we’ve entered the… Read more »

After a busy start to fall migration, banding has slowed down considerably – largely on account of poor weather. We had a bit of rain early in the week, but mostly it was wind that dampened the bird activity. After days of howling, the wind did finally let up and now migration is starting to… Read more »

We are off to a great fall season; only a week in and we have already banded over 320 birds. To put that in perspective, this time last year (which was ultimately a very busy year) we had only banded 85 birds. The big question I have is: are things going to continue to get… Read more »

Can you smell that crisp autumn breeze and see the leaves turning colours all around? No? Me neither… But apparently the birds can. It is the beginning of fall migration at the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory and even on our first day of monitoring (July 12) we saw myrtle warblers flying southbound overhead. It… Read more »

For most of the summer Richard and I have alternating days off because we are the ones with banding permits and one of us needs to be on-site whenever work is being done. Every so often, though, when the weather aligns and we get all our side-projects complete, we get a break between the third… Read more »

There hasn’t been a lot of avian action at the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory; this past week fell between MAPS rounds and so with no banding to do we were forced to find other ways to keep ourselves occupied. Getting caught up on paperwork is always a given for this time of year as… Read more »

Lots of birds have weird names. Names that make you wonder who named them and why. I was thinking about this today when we caught a magnolia warbler at one of our MAPS sites. Hearing the name a person might think that perhaps Magnolia warblers feed on the nectar of magnolia flowers or nests in… Read more »

It is hard to imagine that this summer sprung up from the spring we had; nothing but hot and dry all spring and now nothing but rain. Although the rain is much needed for the vegetation health and lake level, it is definitely hampering our first round of MAPS banding. We operate four sites and… Read more »

This was the last week of spring migration monitoring and overall it was a pretty good week. We caught and banded a few new species: downy woodpecker, Connecticut warbler and cedar waxwing; we had one last busy day with 53 birds captured; and we cleared the 800 mark for banded birds. Eight hundred is average… Read more »