Weekly Reports

Well it is official, fall migration has blown away, literally; the last few days of monitoring were some of the windiest we have seen all season. Unfortunately the windy days prevented us from being able to get the nets open as often as we should have been able to so we didn’t quite hit the… Read more »

This week was a little different – bird-wise everything was very similar to last week – the chickadees and myrtle warblers were still migrating in throngs and American tree sparrows and slate coloured juncos continued to slowly gain in number, but then on the weekend there was something missing at the observatory… Us. In the… Read more »

This past week really typified what I always say about our station: the LSLBO is all or nothing. Many other stations are predictable in their levels of bird activity and have consistent day-to-day banding totals; not us, there is absolutely no predicting whether or not we will be busy. Some days we may count thousands… Read more »

It has been an interesting week. With the exception of one absolutely gorgeous day it has been mostly cold, frosty and windy. Despite rather miserable weather bird activity has remained steady. Myrtle warblers are still pouring out of the northern forests by the thousands and mixed in with them are lots of orange-crowned warblers, blackpoll… Read more »

Raptors are cool, and I am not talking about the prehistoric ones made famous by Jurassic Park (although they are plenty cool), but rather the modern day ones – the birds of prey. September is a great month for raptors in many ways: it is the start of saw-whet owl banding, it is the peak… Read more »

The trees are turning colours, the breeze is getting nippy, and the air has that amazing smell that can only mean one thing… Autumn is here. Fall migration monitoring may have started over a month ago, but it has only really started to feel like fall this past week. Plants and weather aside, there have… Read more »

Just the other day I was marveling at the quality of this summer; not just the sun and heat, but the lack of wind. I blame myself for saying it out loud, but the Lesser Slave Lake area seems to have remembered that it likes being windy. The arrival of wind has certainly put a… Read more »

Fall migration is definitely still in full-swing; we were a little worried that things were winding down after a slow start to the week, but the last few days have been the busiest we’ve had all season. Many species have been building in numbers and are just starting to peak, like myrtle warblers, but some… Read more »

MAPS is done! I I do like MAPS, it’s just that once fall migration starts and the two programs overlap it can become quite stressful. As a brief recap, MAPS is our summer banding program; we run four sites, six times each, in ten day intervals. The reasoning behind only visiting each site once every… Read more »

the bird observatory. Late last week and into the weekend we experienced nothing but high winds and intermittent rain showers. The rain alone wouldn’t have been bad – it prevents us from opening the nets, but sometimes we can witness very heavy migration during rainy days. The wind was the real downer – birds won’t… Read more »