Weekly Reports

It has been a good week for us; we finished off the fifth round of MAPS banding (only one more to go!), had a couple days of solid banding and we have had some great visitors. Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship or MAPS is the program we operate during the summer to monitor and band… Read more »

It may not be autumn, but it is fall… At least as far as we are concerned. We are only a few days into our fall monitoring season and we are already seeing birds actively migrating over. In last week’s article I talked about how the majority of early migrants are young birds and adult… Read more »

By the time this makes it to print we will have commenced our fall migration monitoring season. The middle of July may seem a strange time to start watching for fall migrants but this is actually when the birds begin flying south – or if not right now, within a week or so. We start… Read more »

When you have lived in an area for a while, it is easy to start taking it for granted; to forget what drew you there to begin with. I was brought here by the birds and I stay, year after year, for the birds. Northern Alberta really is a phenomenal bird-watching destination and the Boreal… Read more »

We just completed the second round of MAPS banding; although there are still four more rounds to go, there are already a few things that are starting to stand out about this year. Firstly, we have noticed that there seems to be higher than average numbers of mourning warbler and white-throated sparrow around. Secondly, there… Read more »

It hasn’t been a very eventful week for us at the LSLBO. We completed out first round of MAPS banding and have been trying to get the 40 geolocators I mentioned last week deployed on Canada warblers for the University of Manitoba. We are about two thirds of the way done and we will be… Read more »

Spring migration monitoring is over for the year; we rolled the nets for the last time and packed them away where they will stay until we start fall migration monitoring on July 12. Our last week of monitoring was consistent with the rest of the season – fairly slow. We ended spring with 650 birds… Read more »

Spring migration is winding to an end. With only a week left of monitoring there is no longer the hope that bird activity will pick up and our totals will reach the average. That is okay though, since what we are lacking in quantity, we are making up for in quality. Every spring we expect… Read more »

This week started off with an important day –my favourite day of the year: the Birdathon. Before I get into the recap of our busy birding day, first I want to say a big thank-you to everyone who donated to us; we had our best fund-raising year to-date! This year, our Great Canadian Birdathon started… Read more »

Stuff actually happened this week! Early in the week we had rain showers that started in the evening and didn’t stop until about 6:30 am the next morning. This was exactly what we had been waiting for – weather conditions that would force the birds to take a break from migrating to rest and feed…. Read more »