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 and data entry from spring. Over the last few years, though, we have been putting more and more on our summer plates. The last two years we were conducting an independent research project looking at the fine-scale habitat selection of Canada warblers using telemetry. We are finished with the field component of that project but the University of Alberta wants to build off our work following similar methods to answer some questions about the effects of industry on Canada warblers. This is one the extras we will be undertaking: helping the U of A catch and radio-tag birds for their project. The other, and bigger, extra is helping a fellow named Kevin from Manitoba to deploy 40 geo-locators on Canada warblers throughout the Provincial Park. Before I dive right into geo-locators though, I’m sure many of you are wondering, ‘what’s the deal with these Canada warblers? Why is the LSLBO so obsessed with them? The Canada warbler was listed as a threatened species a few years ago due to huge population decline (80% decline in the last 40 years). Interestingly this decline is far more pronounced in the eastern half of Canada. All around Lesser Slave Lake, they are actually doing quite well. This puts us in an excellent position to study them; our project focused on the breeding grounds, but as with all migratory species, that is only a tiny part of their range. That is where the geo-locators come in; they will help us piece together the warblers’ entire migratory route. The geo-locators will show us where the birds go, if they stop for any length of time in specific areas and where they ultimately end up spending their winters. Geo-locators are really neat technology, they keep track of the date and time and minutes of light. The data can then be inputted into a computer and based on the date and how much light the locator was exposed to, a latitudinal and longitudinal position point can be calculated. Some units also record the temperature, which, when compared to the location points will give altitudes. Geo-locating technology has been around for quite a long time but units small enough to be used on birds have only been engineered within the last 5-10 years. They need to be small because they have to sit on the bird’s back. Held on by a flexible string harness the geo-locator will stay in place until the bird is hopefully recaptured the following year and the unit is removed so that the data can be retrieved (the locators are too small to have any data transmitting capabilities). What is really exciting is how far this technology has come in only the last few years; when researchers first started using geo-locators on birds they were limited to larger species because the units weighed almost two grams. Now they have locators as small as .3 grams, and that is what Kevin has. This year, in Lesser Slave Lake Provincial Park will be the first time that geo-locators are being used on a Canada warbler and although it will require a heap of effort and time to catch and outfit 40 birds with geo-locators we are stocked to be a part of it!
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On November 1st, we banded our last bird of the 2026 field season. Unsurprisingly, since Owl Fall Migration Monitoring is our last monitoring program to wrap up, it was this beautiful Northern Saw-whet Owl! In total we had an above average, but not record-breaking year with 165 Northern Saw-whet Owls and 7 Boreal Owls banded. Stay tuned for our full year in review when we publish our 2026 Annual Report in early January. Missing the birds already? Join us for the 32nd Annual Slave Lake Christmas Bird Count happening on Saturday, Dec. 19th this year! Stay tuned for more information soon. Note: Birds are handled by professionals and released unharmed as permitted by federal and provincial authorities.
On Sept 13, 2026, our owl researcher Robyn Perkins banded a young female Northern Saw-whet Owl at the Boreal Centre for Bird Conservation (band 1124-61706). She was a hatch-year (hatched this spring/summer) and heading out on her first migration. We were excited to learn that she was recaptured just a month later on Oct 15, 2026 at the Rocky Point Bird Observatory in Victoria BC. Despite her young age, she crossed the Rocky Mountains and already travelled over 1300 kilometers during her first fall migration! Even more amazing, this is the second Northern Saw-whet Owl originally banded by the LSLBO (2016) and later recaptured at Rocky Point BO (2018). Thank you to Rocky Point Bird Observatory for sending us such great pictures of this little traveller.
We are thrilled to announce that Birds Canada installed a Motus Wildlife Tracking System (motus.org/) tower last week at the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory. A program of Birds Canada, Motus is an international collaborative research network that uses automated radio telemetry to track the movement and behaviour of small animals, like birds, bats, and even insects. There are almost 2500 Motus stations around the world and that number is growing every day! Motus stations are constantly listening for tiny, lightweight nanotags that have been deployed by researchers on small flying animals. When a tagged animal flies within 10 - 15 km of a tower, its unique signal can be detected and uploaded to the shared database managed by Birds Canada. If it is detected at multiple Motus stations, we can start tracking that individuals’ migratory movements. Situated on a major migratory flyway on Lesser Slave Lake, we are hoping that this Motus station will provide the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the migratory movements and habitat needs of the boreal bird species that we monitor at the LSLBO. For more information on the Motus program, check out motus.org. We would like to thank Birds Canada and Alberta Parks for all of their support for the establishment of the LSLBO Motus station!