Weekly Reports

In celebration of the wonderful weather I am sitting out on my deck to write my article today. As I write, the pair of tree swallows that nested in my birdhouse are busily coming and going with mouths full of insects to feed to their hungry chicks. These swallows seem remarkably brave little birds. They… Read more »

Last week I got a very interesting call. It was the Information Officer, Michelle, from the Boreal Centre calling to tell me that a man was there who wanted help identifying a picture of what he believed to be a bay-breasted warbler hybrid. Naturally I was skeptical but curious. Hybrids are very rare in the… Read more »

After all that talk in my last article about being crazy busy this week, I am astonished to report that we have already (miraculously?) pulled through it. We finished our first round of MAPS banding, Richard outfitted ten Canada Warblers with radio transmitters and coloured banded many more up in High Prairie and Kevin Fraser… Read more »

Spring migration monitoring officially ended June 10, throwing us into what will be our busiest time of the year. Traditionally our summers were spent just doing our MAPS program (Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship) – which involves banding breeding birds at four specific locations deeper in the forest, and getting caught up on net repair… Read more »

What a great week! The weather, the wildlife, the warblers, I don’t know where to start! Early in the week we were disheartened by a forecast showing lots of rain; we were finally catching more birds only to have inclement weather threatening to shut down netting. Fortunately for us, the showers ended up playing in… Read more »

After weeks of having too little to write about, I find myself with almost too much to write about. For starters, banding has finally picked up at the lab – our total has doubled since last week. We haven’t caught a large number of any one species in particular, but we have caught consistent numbers… Read more »

Sometimes it feels like it is all a numbers game. It is, sort of, technically… Our purpose, after all, is coming up with daily totals of each bird species we encounter so we can derive trends to determine if their populations are stable or not. But lately, it is feeling like instead of just recording… Read more »

Hooray! The birds have arrived! The diversity of species around the lab this week has exploded. Yellow warbler, black-and-white warbler, Lincoln’s sparrow, white-throated sparrow, Swainson’s thrush, least flycatcher, and western tanager, just to name a few, have arrived and are exuberantly advertising their presence with song. With an increase in birds in the area, we… Read more »

This week, spring migration monitoring was brought to us by Mistress Winter. She doled out her best: snow, frigid winds and cold temperatures. Although we are experiencing a lingering bit of winter up here, it is the winter conditions down south that are truly foiling us. Many bird species that should have arrived by now… Read more »

April 23rd was the big day this year – the day the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory began spring migration monitoring for its 21st year. Once again the Observatory will be run by Richard Krikun and myself, Nicole Linfoot. This year, however, we will be joined by a third person: Ryan, who is scheduled to… Read more »