Weekly Reports

The weather has finally decided to play nice this past week and banding consequently picked up. The wind hasn’t been blowing and the mostly overcast skies kept temperatures low creating ideal migrating and foraging conditions for songbirds. With a banding total of 101 one day (our new busiest day for the fall) and two days… Read more »

This week was the last week for our summer student Robyn Perkins and it was also the last week for me doing songbird migration monitoring. Robyn will be moving back to Camrose to start her final semester of post-secondary and we will be sad to see her go – she was a great worker and… Read more »

As I write this August is winding down and September is approaching fast. The leaves are just starting to turn yellow at the observatory and it is beginning to smell distinctly of autumn. With the changing season we are starting to see more changes in bird diversity. With the exception of myrtle warblers, which have… Read more »

So remember in an earlier article at the beginning of fall when I said that we were unusually busy and I was curious if that meant we were going to get crazy busy during our peak or if we were using up all the birds and would have a super slow second half of fall?… Read more »

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 »