Weekly Reports

Another slow week at the LSLBO. We have been hampered by windy weather that forced us to keep our nets closed more often than not. We only recently cracked the 600 mark for the fall; typically we are around 900 by this time. The slow banding coupled with the lack of overhead migration is furthering… Read more »

Over the past week, migration has slowly picked up. We are seeing Tennessee warbler and myrtle warbler moving overhead in increasing numbers every morning. Still nothing like we expect to see this time of year, but it’s an improvement from last week. Other species that are steadily migrating are western tanager (in surprisingly good numbers)… Read more »

Bird activity is still slow at the observatory, slow enough that we are starting to wonder if something is wrong. We spend our many hours of not seeing or catching birds speculating as to why we have so many hours to spend speculating. We have one main hypothesis that has a couple pieces of supporting… Read more »

Unfortunately it has been another slow week at the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory. Not many birds have been seen actively migrating and even fewer have been banded. We partly blame the poor weather again, but even the nicer days haven’t produced much bird activity. Despite low levels of migration, there are still lot of… Read more »

After our spectacular start to fall migration, with 122 birds banded over 2 days, we all but stalled-out due to windy and rainy conditions. Over the last six days we have only caught around half that bringing the total for the season to just over 200. Not only has the banding been slow, but we… Read more »

Fall migration has begun! Well one day of it happened anyways, and what a day it was! Typically the first day of the season is slow, but today we banded 62 birds representing 18 species. Just over a third of those birds were hatch-year myrtle warblers. Canada warbler were also common in the nets and… Read more »

Not a very eventful week this week. We finished off some counts and surveys and completed the third round of MAPS. Despite being in a lull right now, we know it is the calm before the storm. In less than a week we will be starting up fall migration monitoring and then we will have… Read more »

We were scheduled to do our second round of MAPS this week, but very nearly weren’t able to. High winds and rain delayed us for several days causing us to start the round on the 23 instead of the 20. This didn’t mean we got bonus days off, rather it meant some days getting caught… Read more »

Last week I mentioned how we were doing point counts throughout the Provincial Park this summer but I didn’t go into much detail. Back in 2010 we took a map of the Park and randomly generated 100 points and then visited each of those points and collected data on the bird species present, this past… Read more »

Spring migration is over and summer is upon us! We finished off spring migration June 10 with 813 birds banded of 47 species. This is below the average, but not by as much as we feared after the very slow start we had. White-throated sparrow were the top banded species followed by Swainson’s thrush and… Read more »