The crew of the Tatlayoko Lake Bird Observatory is getting ready to start our fifth banding season on August 1st. The roster of volunteers and banders is nearly full (so contact us soon if you’re thinking of participating this year!). Steve Ogle is set to return as Bander-in-Charge. Chris Chutter will join as Assistant Bander for part of the season. And as always, Peter and Roma Shaughnessy will be our accommodating hosts.
This season we are excited to test our newly installed solar power system in the banding building. We anticipate this will provide enough power to run the laptops, have lights on in the early morning and allow a charging station for our portable radios. The biggest advantage from this solar power is that we will not be limited by our computer batteries running out before the end of the daily banding session!
The 2010 bird banding season will harness the power of the sun to run computers, lights and charging stations.
The exact capacity of the system remains to be determined–we’ll report back soon on how well our alternative energy experiment is going. Many thanks to the donors who generously contributed to the system.
Once banding gets going at the beginning of August we will once again be posting daily blogs and photos. Remember to bookmark this blog so you can keep up-to-date about the monitoring project.
In the meantime, you can find out things like the ten most frequently banded birds of last season in the 2009 banding season report.
Looking forward to another great year!
~TLBO banding crew
Tatlayoko Lake Bird Observatory 