Weekly Reports

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 »

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 »