Weekly Reports

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 »

I regret to inform everyone who enjoys my articles that this will be the last one for the season. With northern saw-whet owl banding winding down there is getting to be very little birding news from the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory. Not to worry, though, for the avid birder there most certainly are still… Read more »

Well, that’s that, fall migration monitoring is done and we’ve rolled and packed the nets for the last time. If I had to pick one word to describe the last week of the season it would be anticlimactic. This fall we had more busy banding days than I have ever worked during a single season… Read more »

We are entering the last week of fall migration at the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory. The end of the field season is always a conflict of emotions. I am sad that it means winter is truly right around the corner and it is time to pack up the shorts, bikes and tennis rackets. I… Read more »

In the last article I wrote about how things were slowing down at the observatory… Well, I was wrong. In the first two weeks of September we have banded over 750 birds which way more than we normally catch in the entire month. What is even more surprising is that we could have banded a… Read more »

I feel as though I don’t have much to write about this week; activity at the lab has continued in much the same way as the last few weeks. We are still seeing very good numbers of myrtle warblers migrating and are still catching decent numbers of birds. The late fall migrants I mentioned last… Read more »

We have been doing fall migration monitoring for a month and a half but only now is it actually starting to feel like fall. With morning temperatures dropping into the single digits and the trees starting to show some colour it is hard to deny that summer is coming to an end. Not only is… Read more »

It has been another fantastic week at the observatory! We had a couple days of poor weather that limited our banding time and caused low bird counts, but overall the weather cooperated and birds continued moving through in good numbers. We certainly noticed a decrease in diversity though; last week we saw large flocks comprised… Read more »

This past week we have banded more birds than we did during all of spring migration; we don’t even need to count the whole week – in only five days we beat the almost two months’ worth of spring banding. Naturally, with that much banding, there was also a lot of observations. Most days this… Read more »