Weekly Reports

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 »

With the arrival of June, spring migration has started petering out. We are no longer seeing birds migrating overhead and haven’t encountered any new species this week. Surprisingly, despite lowered rates of obvious migration, we are still catching decent numbers of birds. We have been averaging about 30 birds a day which brings our spring… Read more »

It has been a great week at the observatory! The first two days were solid rain – which although we really needed and were thankful for – meant that we couldn’t do any netting. Despite not being able to catch birds, there was a lot to see. Hundreds of warblers and sparrows were observed migrating… Read more »

The birds must have finally got the memo: spring is here! The first half of the week was more of what we have been experiencing thus far, cool mornings, hot late-mornings, slow migration and even slower banding. We suspect that a number of factors were at play to cause the low level of bird activity…. Read more »

It has been another ho hum week at the bird observatory. Although a few new species like Swainson’s thrush, black-and-white warbler, and western tanager have shown up, the forest and skies are still pretty low in bird diversity. Banding has also been slow, we only banded 35 birds this week which finally pushed out spring… Read more »

Without a doubt this is the most different May I have ever experienced in Slave Lake. In a typical year this is when the lake would be breaking up and trees would be starting to bud out. This year, however, the lake is already completely open and the trees are almost fully leafed out. It… Read more »

It was stop and go for a while but spring is definitely here now. The abnormally warm temperatures in early April allowed us to open the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory for its 23rd year on the 15th – our earliest start date ever. This year, exactly as it has been for the last 12… Read more »