Even though it was just over a week ago that we were still operating our migration monitoring program it now feels like a very distant memory. With the end of September, the gears shift at the TLBO from juggling both morning songbird monitoring and nighttime owl banding to a full focus on the latter. Our regular season owl banding program wrapped up on the evening of September 30th when we caught 14 owls (second highest count of the season) for a total of 88 banded and four recaptures in 11 nights over the course of the month. This is by far our highest total on record as it is a full 26 owls higher than the previous record of 62 (2019) which had the exact same amount of effort with 11 nights of banding.
With five nights gone in October I have been able to get out on three of those namely, the 2nd (12 banded), 4th (9 banded) and 5th (11 banded) for a total of 32 owls banded and one recapture! That is a grand total of 120 new owls banded and 5 recaptures which is only 13 shy of 2021’s record of 133. Of the 120 owls that we have banded thus far only 15 were adults (11 second-years, one after-second-year, one after-third-year, and two fourth-years). This is a bit of a higher percentage (12.5%) than we traditionally see in a big reproductive year but one possibility is that many of these adults bred locally. It is heartening to see so many second-years as the first year of a Northern Saw-whet owls’ life is the most fraught with high mortality rates. With a volunteer gap in this week’s schedule I have had the pleasure of being joined first by Krista and Iain and then by my good friend and local resident Jim Sims on the last two evenings.
As we have done in the past two seasons Sachi and I packed up half of the songbird mist-nets and left the rest in place so that I am able to do some daytime non-standard songbird banding whenever the mood takes me. I have opened up nets on four days this month for roughly 1-2 hour sessions for a total of 19 new birds banded and one recapture. The bulk of these have been sparrows namely, Golden-crowned and White-crowned who have been making their way through the valley. The highlights so far for me have been our second Fox Sparrow, sixth, seventh, and eight Varied Thrushes and our second Wilson’s Snipe (fifth overall) which had been evading me all week until today!
Wilson’s Snipe!
Another routine that I have continued has been birding the census route every day so far this month except for on the 5th when I spent the day helping a neighbour dismantle an internet tower in the next valley over. It is exciting to spend my second October birding in the valley as there is so little data on what birds are present during this period. Lapland Longspurs are a notoriously tricky species to detect so it has been a pleasure to have observed an individual on four separate occasions (October 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 6th). As I was walking the census route on the 2nd, I had the good fortune to first hear and then observe two Long-billed Dowitchers as they were foraging in the shallows. The next day I had a brief but delightful encounter with the post fire specialist, Black-backed Woodpecker and our first October detection of an immature Ring-billed Gull.
Two years ago, when I stuck around for the inaugural October owling extension, I was witness to a spectacle of Snow Goose migration on the 4th when I logged 357 individuals as they flew south in Vs of varying sizes over the course of nearly seven hours. With this in the back of my mind I headed down to the station early on the 4th in the hopes that perhaps I would get lucky again. As fate would have it the overcast skies and intermittent rain must have been a signal for goose migration as I would log 161 Snow Geese, 307 Canada Geese, along with the hotspot’s first record of Cackling Goose as I was able to pick out two amidst a V of 60 Canada’s!
I had three more surprises today the first of which was my first sighting of a Greater Scaup in our study area, which are the rarer of the two Scaup species in the Cariboo, as it loafed amidst a mixed species raft in the lagoon. Out on the lake I spied our first Barrow’s Goldeneye of the season which is rather unusual as over the past five or so years this has been the species of Goldeneye that we more often encounter during monitoring. An adult Northern Shrike topped the day off as I was packing up to head home to begin to draft this post.
The weather is looking near perfect again this evening for owling so with any luck we will surpass 2021’s total tonight!
Stay tuned for another update in five days or so.
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Northern Saw-whet Owl Banding | ||
Date | Owls Banded | Owls Recaptured |
02-Oct | 12 | |
04-Oct | 9 | 1 |
05-Oct | 11 |
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Non-standard Banding – Oct. 01 to 06 | ||
Species | Banded | Recaptured |
White-crowned Sparrow | 6 | |
Golden-crowned Sparrow | 3 | |
Varied Thrush | 3 | |
Ruby-crowned Kinglet | 2 | |
Wilson’s Snipe | 1 | |
Yellow-rumped Warbler | 1 | |
Fox Sparrow | 1 | |
Lincoln’s Sparrow | 1 | |
Dark-eyed Junco | 1 | |
Black-capped Chickadee | 1 |
Congrats on these high owl banding numbers! Fingers crossed you’ll pass that 2021 record.
Thanks! We did it!