Weekly Banding Reports

As September draws to a close, so too does the LSLBO’s third record-breaking fall season in a row. In total we have banded 5,336 birds of 66 species, smashing last year’s total of 3,966! The top five species banded this fall were: Tennessee Warbler, Myrtle Warbler, Swainson’s Thrush, American Redstart, and Ovenbird. All five of… Read more »

The torrent of migrants that the LSLBO was experiencing earlier in the season has slowed considerably. Our season-to-date total now sits at 5,273 birds banded of sixty-three species, and we have been capturing less than twenty birds a day, most of them Myrtle Warblers and Slate-coloured Juncos. As the leaves continue to change colour and… Read more »

This past week of migration monitoring at the LSLBO has been frequently interrupted by high winds, but even during the waning days of fall migration, new species continue to arrive. Many of the birds that we are currently seeing around the station are short- or medium-distance migrants who winter in southern Canada or the United… Read more »

For the second time this fall, the LSLBO has received word of one of our banded birds being recovered elsewhere. This time, a young Swainson’s Thrush captured on July 27 was reported in Humboldt, Saskatchewan on August 30. It was not easy for the finder to determine its species, however, because they recovered only a… Read more »

When a bird is banded, it receives a leg band that is stamped with a unique number allowing it to be identified as an individual. However, the odds that a given bird will be seen again are very small: think of how many birds there are in North America, and how few bird banders! A… Read more »

Fall migration has been looking rather different at the LSLBO this week. Instead of the Tennessee Warblers that have been so numerous for so long, recently we have seen an increase in Swainson’s Thrushes – another one of our most banded species. They are one of several different thrush species that we band here at… Read more »

Despite the often windy and sometimes raining weather hampering bird activity and frequently keeping our mist-nets closed, it has been an exciting week for the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory. Tennessee Warblers continue to migrate south in large flocks and with 1,160 banded so far, we are creeping closer to banding almost double the previous… Read more »

In North America, bird banding stations are typically much busier during the fall than they are in the spring, as fall migration monitoring runs for a longer duration and captures large numbers of young birds that hatched just a few months previously. For migratory birds especially, population numbers reach an annual peak around this time… Read more »

By Robyn Perkins, LSLBO Bander-in-Charge On August 1 the LSLBO’s 2021 Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) program finished. MAPS is an international banding initiative in which sites of 10 mist-nets are visited once every 10 days over the breeding season. We operate four of these sites. When we band birds, we estimate their age… Read more »

There is so much variety in the size and coloration of birds, that it comes as no surprise their beaks are no different. From the long, thin needle of a hummingbird, to the flat bill of a duck, every bird has a beak shaped conveniently for their preferred diets. Of the forty-three species we have… Read more »