Weekly Reports

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 »

MAPS is over! A couple weeks ago I wrote about how we had only one more round to go and now I can happily announce that it is over for the year. It’s not that we don’t like MAPS – it’s just that it lacks the comfort of the migration station and once falls migration… Read more »

This week was punctuated by one good day and one really good day of banding and a lot of days that could have been really good had it been less windy. During the only two calm days this week, we caught just over 100 birds from a large diversity of species; on the other five… Read more »

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 »