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Notes from the Field

Migration Mystery: Listen to the singing!

This morning we woke up to a lot more bird songs in the forest compared to what we’d been hearing in the days before. We were pretty excited. We waited and watched for any of them to fly into our nets.

 

In this video, you can’t really see that there are lots of birds around, but you sure can hear them! At the end of the movie, you’ll also see Brian and Nicole coming out of the woods where we have some nets up. See those cloth bags they are carrying? Each one has a robin in it! The bags are used to transport the birds safely to the location where we work with them. Our nets caught five birds this morning, all at once. We really hit the jackpot!

 

 
Meet our four new space robins: Zee, Big Mac, Pepperoni and Billie Jo

We’ve got four more space robins to introduce you to today! You may be wondering why there are only four birds to introduce you to today, even though we actually caught five.

It’s because not all of the birds we caught were big enough to carry the mini-GPS tags, so we had to let them go after weighing them. Here are photos of the four new space robins:

Zee_namecard
Zee is an adult male. His name was chosen by Mrs. Fluger’s 4th grade class. That’s my daughter Aline’s class! (Credit: Natalie Boelman)

 

Pepperoni_namecard
Pepperoni is an adult female – our first female! Her name was chosen by Mrs. Rudin’s 4th grade class. (Credit: Ruthie Oliver)

 

BigMac_namecard
Big Mac is a 1 year old (juvenile) male. His name was chosen by Mrs. Christie-Blick’s 5th grade class. (Credit: Willem Boelman)

 

Billie Jo_namecard
Billie Jo is an adult male. His name was chosen by Mrs. Early’s 5th grade class.

Suiting up a space robin

This movie shows Nicole and Brian suiting up one of our new space robins with a harness and mini-GPS. You can see the bird is relatively calm and cooperative.

Movie credit: Natalie Boelman

 

Releasing a space robin back into the wild

This movie shows Brian releasing one of our space robins back into the wild. Nicole showed us that if you put a bird on it’s back, it stays very still because it has no experience being on its back in the wild – it just doesn’t know what to do on it’s back, so it does nothing. The movie shows Brian giving this technique a shot – pretty neat!

Movie credit: Willem Boelman

 

How to hold a little bird

This last movie is of Nicole showing us how to hold a little bird. She does the demonstration with a cute little Black-capped Chickadee, not a robin. You can read about Black-capped Chickadees here: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Black-capped_Chickadee/id. Nicole shows us two different ‘grips’ (or holds) that keep the bird safe while it is being examined: ‘Bander’s grip’ or ‘Photographer’s grip’.

Movie credit: Natalie Boelman

 

More space robins are on their way!

Well, that’s all we have to report today, but we think that a whole lot more robins will be showing up in Slave Lake very soon. That’s because Nicole has a friend living in the city of Edmonton (which is located about 250 km south of Slave Lake) who told her yesterday that there are tons of robins in Edmonton all of sudden. As the birds make their way north from Edmonton, some of them will likely stop in Slave Lake to eat and rest. So stay tuned!