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 upon thousands of birds but catch less than ten. Other days we will both see and catch tons of birds, or see nothing but catch lots. Still other days we don’t see or catch anything… Those days I dislike. For all but one day this week there was very heavy migration beginning right at sunrise and continuing steady throughout the entire day. Black-capped chickadees continued their strange irruptive migration- on a couple days we observed more than 600 individuals. Boreal chickadees also joined the fray. Typically we see only a handful of boreals in an entire year, one day this week we saw 70. Myrtle warblers also consistently exceeded 1000 individuals a day. Despite migration being very consistent our banding totals have been all over the map. The slowest day we caught 6 birds and the busiest we banded 80. This inconsistency has to do with the nature of why our station was established where it is. There are two different reasons why an area would have a particularly high number of birds making it a suitable area to establish a bird observatory. The first reason is that the area is extremely attractive to birds as a stop-over or breeding site because of high food availability. This is the case for many stations that are set up alongside marshes, wetlands or other areas of prime habitat, such as Beaverhill Bird Observatory or Delta Marsh Bird Observatory. The other reason is geographic funnelling – the habitat itself is not drawing the birds in, it is the adjacent habitat that is repelling them. The LSLBO has high bird numbers and diversity almost entirely for this reason; the birds don’t want to fly across the lake and they also don’t want to fly over Marten Mountain so they are funnelled along the shoreline of the lake. It isn’t that our patch of forest is bad habitat; it just isn’t anything spectacular and is no different than the rest of the forest along the 100 km length of Lesser Slave Lake. Because our site isn’t actively attracting birds it is all a matter of luck if they decide to stop and feed in our area instead of the countless other areas they could pick as they migrate along. If they don’t choose to stop and feed they just pass overhead well out of the range of our nets. Thankfully, although more birds pass over us than stop to visit the nets, we do still generally catch enough to keep us occupied; certainly enough to make taking time off a challenge. On one of my days off this week I was called in to help when a flock of 50 myrtle warblers all got caught in net six. I don’t mind losing the day off though since I know that very soon all the birds will be gone. One sign of the approaching end arrived this week – the first of the last – an American tree sparrow. This arctic breeder is always the very first bird to pass through in the spring and it is the very last species to pass through again in the fall.
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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!