Weekly Reports

The story of the birds this spring for the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory is “it has been slow”. With 405 birds banded so far, we are well on our way to experiencing one of the slowest years for captures. We have just beat 2011 which caught 360 birds before the station was evacuated on May 11 due to wildfires, ending 2011’s spring a month early. There are only thirteen more days to beat the next lowest year of 446 bands in 1996 (which also had particularly low mist-netting effort).

And it is not the case that we are seeing thousands of birds overhead, but none of them are finding the nets since the sky is likewise fairly empty and I do not expect the birds will move in big numbers again until fall. We are nearing the end of songbird migration with few species left to arrive and many of our local breeders already sitting on eggs.

On May 21, we completed our Great Canadian Birdathon Fundraiser where all our field staff and long-time supporter Wayne Bowles attempted to find as many species possible in a day. I am happy to report our results of a fantastic 107 species in just over twelve straight hours of birding from 4:45 AM to 5:20 PM. After spending the morning at the station where the birds were uncooperative and did not migrate overhead for us, we scoured local wetlands to find some waterfowl species and visited feeders in town.

Above (left to right): Team Tanager’s Andy Nguyen, Bronwyn Robinson, Wayne Bowles, and Robyn Perkins.

The highlights of our big day was a Chestnut-sided Warbler singing in the parking lot of the station and a Western Meadowlark at a pond just off highway 88. There were, however, some common species we just could not find such as Blue Jays and House Wrens! All the species we found can be seen at the end of this report.

Team Tanager surpassed our fundraising goal with $1,020 raised and will continue to accept donations until June 1. Of these funds, 75% go directly to us and 25% goes to Birds Canada to help support storing and analysing our and other station’s data. This year’s funds will go to building a ramp off our banding building so our tours may be accessible to all mobility needs and if we have left overs, to replacing our evermore fickle speakers for our owl monitoring program.

The great diversity has included Spring Migration Monitoring which found our first ever Hudsonian Godwit to become the 245 species recorded during standard monitoring efforts since 1994. Currently, 160 species have been identified during Spring Migration Monitoring since April 16, 2025. This is an amazing total as we average 142 species per spring with a low of 109 species in 1996 and a high of 161 species in 2001. Other species highlights included Turkey Vulture, Lark Sparrow, Yellow-billed Loon, American Golden-plover, Western Meadowlark, Eurasian Collared-dove, Great Crested Flycatcher, and the first Short-eared Owl since 2003.

Also this last weekend we had an extremely successful annual Songbird Festival on May 24, welcoming over 300 visitors to the family activities at the Boreal Centre for Bird Conservation and 151 visitors to see banding demonstrations at the bird observatory.

By Robyn Perkins, LSLBO Bander-in-Charge

List of all 107 species found on Team Tanager’s Great Canadian Birdathon day in taxonomic order: