Sarah has been able to band on 5 days in August, effectively kick-starting the Fall banding season. It’s been a great help!

I got back from the East Coast yesterday and was anxious to see what was happening at the Farm – especially as the prairie meadow had just had its first mowing. About half of the field had been cut and will be baled on the 5th. To maintain the meadow as a vibrant entity it will require mowing or o burn every year. The good thing about these grasses is that the cut isn’t made until into July when all nesting birds will have fledged young.

The cutting seems to have made the field even more attractive to a surprising variety of birds: Bobolinks, Song Sparrows, a Nashville Warbler, and (surprisingly – to me, at least) a young Marsh Wren that Liam astutely picked out as NOT a young House Wren.

It will be interesting to see the impact of baling as right now the windrows are quite think and heavy with the long-stemmed grasses.

There were not many warblers to be seen along the wetland edge but….we did catch and band an early Blackpoll Warbler. Which goes to show: you just never know.

Mosquitoes evidently had a pretty good year but aren’t as annoying as they were last year. Still, a head net or bug jacket might help you retain some sanity as the little blighters like to attack when you can’t use your hands, extracting, banding, scribing…..

Banded 38:
1 Least Flycatcher
1 Red-eyed Vireo
1 Marsh Wren
1 Carolina Wren
2 Gray Catbird
5 Song Sparrows
1 Swamp Sparrow
13 Bobolinks
2 Nashville Warblers
2 Common Yellowthroats
1 Blackpoll Warbler
4 Rose-breasted Grosbeaks
4 Indigo Buntings

Rick

Although we tend to think that there’s still a lot of Summer left, for many birds (and bats and butterflies) it’s almost over and the time to head south is here. Yellow Warblers are a common nesting bird in this area but after August 1st, I’m lucky if I see any and even luckier if I catch and band them. They nest, fledge young, moult, and then off they go. Same with swallows….although many spend some time in the area going to roosts for the night and then spreading out during the day to feed. For the past couple of weeks the Grand River around York and local farmers’ fields have been their daytime haunt. [The marshes around Port Maitland, downriver from Dunnville, are a good spot to search for roosting birds in the evening.]


It’s a magical thing to stand in the middle of the prairie grass field when all you can hear is the wind swishing through the grasses.

Right now there isn’t a lot of observable activity at the Farm. Young birds of the year are dispersing to look for good breeding areas for next Spring and adults are lying low while they go through an extensive moult. Bird song is only intermittent…but they’re around. And soon, when the migration really gets going, they’ll be there in large numbers. We’ll be ready. We’re preparing to put in a full Fall season which we plan to run from the end of August to the middle of November. We’re excited about the possibilities. If you’re interested in volunteering – or just finding out what it’s all about – email me: rludkin@hotmail.com [Put something about “banding” in the subject line.]

Hoping to identify and find out more about the bats in our area, Michelle Karam director of Land Care Niagara brought her team out to the Farm on Saturday evening. It was interesting – and a real learning experience – to see them put up sky nets extending 6 meters high. She tried to find areas that bats would use as “corridors”; e.g., along the laneway and through natural openings between the meadow and the pond. As with banding birds, patience is a virtue. this time, however, it wasn’t rewarded: we didn’t catch any. But there were a few around – their calls were being picked up by receivers. Evidently it is already “late” for them – most have headed south. Next year we’ll try in June and July.

But the night wasn’t a complete loss. I called in an Eastern Screech Owl using my phone. The bird checked out the trees all around us. When it couldn’t find another owl it showed its dismay and disgust at our intrusion by crapping – from well above me – onto my hand. Now that was a surprise! The Screech Owls at the Farm have been using our Wood Duck boxes as nesting sites. This bird was just letting me know that he wasn’t to be trifled with….
Rick

“What!? Snow Buntings in the heat of summer!?” I can hear your exclamations now. But we have some great news. Oliver Love, Christie Macdonald, and I started the Canadian Snow Bunting Network over a dozen years ago to get banders interested in braving cold Winter conditions in order to try and unravel some of the mystery surrounding these wonderful birds that we see for only a couple of months of the year. Not much was known about their breeding biology and about their movement between their Summer nesting grounds (some of them in the VERY high Arctic) and their Winter grounds.

With small passerines you have to band a lot of them to begin to get data on them. It’s always a thrill when of “your” birds is recovered at a far-off location. Several southern Ontario birds (including one of ours) has been recovered on the West coast of Greenland!

The University of Windsor (Oliver Love) has been trying to sort out what happens with these birds in the Arctic. For a couple of years he’s had a team of students chasing them down in Iqaluit and area. I’ve worked with some of the members of that team spending hours wandering the tundra searching for nests and then following their success….or failure. Grad student Samuelle Provencal-Simard (“Sam”) currently heads up that team. Recently she sent out a request for information on a banded bird that had been recaptured at a nest in Iqaluit. It was one of ours!!! Marnie had caught and banded this female in mid-January at her Farm and the recovery was in mid-July. It will be interesting to follow this bird and see how it does….and whether it returns.

One of the goals of the Canadian Snow Bunting Network is to find out the movements of these birds in Winter and sort out their migration routes. I mean, how did Marnie’s bird get from her farm to Iqaluit. Did it take the St. Lawrence River – Labrador coast – Baffin Island route? (Many of the banding recoveries of birds banded in southern Ontario show that this is an important migration corridor for Snow Buntings.) Or…? Bruce Murphy in New Liskeard in northern Ontario has “exchanged” birds with banders in southern Ontario, which suggests a more direct N-S route. Unravelling this question has become one of Sam’s major projects. This past Winter she attached MOTUS tags on a number of Snow Buntings. Some were captured by David Lamble in Fergus. One bird was released there; one was transported to Windsor and released; another was transported to Port Rowan and released.

Another bird was captured by our team at the York Airport and, after radio tagging, released there.

A MOTUS tag emits a radio signal unique to that particular bird. If the bird is relatively close to a receiver it will register and there will be a record of that bird’s travels and timelines. Sam let me know that one of our birds (not the one mapped below) actually travelled 1300 kilometers during its time in southern Ontario, flying from one foraging site to another – evidently over quite a wide area. [A question I have: when a bird finds a rich feeding site, like our airport site, why does it bother to wander over long distances looking for other food sources? For example, there have been a couple of instances where birds banded in “the Triangle” – 3 feeding sites about 10 kilometers from each other (York Airport, Nancy’s Dry Lake Road site, and Marnie’s farm site) – have been recaptured on the same day at two of these sites. Why the extra travel? Predator avoidance? Or…?]

Below are 4 maps showing the movements of 4 MOTUS tagged Snow Buntings.

This gets more and more interesting – and exciting!

This summer I took a job with Canadian Wildlife Service – Prairie Region, to get some more experience with motus tagging, point counts and just more exposure with fieldwork. We started out the field season in Nashlyn, a grazing co-op in southwest Saskatchewan. This spot is owned by Environment Canada, and so it acted as our training grounds for the first two weeks. During this time we familiarized ourselves with the various protocols: point counting, rapid habitat surveys, and banding. We also prepped and deployed ARUs (Automatic Recording Units) to record bird song and document which birds are present in different areas of the pasture. Rick and I have been speculating that adding a couple ARUs to our monitoring at the Haldimand Bird Observatory’s Hurkman’s Farm site could be a great way to sample breeding birds and migrating birds alike as they use the site.

While at Nashlyn I also got to prep a few motus tags, which was tedious but also a lot of fun. We joked that it’s like arts and crafts for biologists. We were cutting and gluing harnesses onto the tags themselves, and also checking that all the tags were active. That week my supervisor gave us all a tutorial on attaching the harnesses to the birds, which I will get to do myself later in the field season.


We are targeting Chestnut-collared Longspurs, Thick-billed Longspurs, Horned Larks, and Sprague’s Pipits to attach motus tags to. This will allow us a better understanding of their fall migration movements, and in some cases their return migration in the spring. We are also targeting Baird’s Sparrows, Brewer’s Sparrows, Grasshopper Sparrows, and Chestnut-collared Longspurs to take tail feather samples to be used by the Bird Genoscape Project. In previous years at HBO we have also taken tail feather samples to be sent to the Bird Genoscape Project. If you wish to learn more about this project, you can take a look at their website here: https://www.birdgenoscape.org/making-genoscapes/

As you might imagine, catching birds in mist nets works a little differently in a wide open prairie. We can’t just set the nets up and expect a bird to fly in as its going about its day. Instead we have to take a more active approach! We have the nets set out in a “t” shape, one across and then two coming out from either side perpendicular to the main net. We use a speaker with a playback and a decoy to draw a bird in, and then we run towards it to flush it into one of the nets. Here are some of the fruits of our labour:

For the past three weeks we have been point counting in Saskatchewan, first at Grasslands National Park and then in the Big Muddy region in the central-southern part of the province. We have had many cool finds including Burrowing Owls, Rock Wrens, Yellow-breasted Chats, and Common Poorwills, among the other more common grassland species. We have just recently arrived in western Alberta, in the fescue grasslands in the foothills of the Rockies. Here we will soon be point counting at Piikani First Nation, and then in southern Alberta. After the point counts are finished we will have 3-4 weeks of banding, first in Twin River Alberta, then Nashlyn Saskatchewan, and finally Ellis Archie Manitoba. It has been a wonderful experience so far, with a great field crew, beautiful landscapes and amazing birds and wildlife.
Sarah

And In Other News: