By: Claire Molina, AmeriCorps Avian Field Technician
Our Northern Saw-whet Owl (NSWO) migration banding season
went off with a bang. On October 4th, we started off our season by catching 7
owls and it only went up from there. After 15 nights of banding owls, we had
180 captures and processed 154 individual owls.
144 of those captured were new birds and 36 were recaptures. 13
recaptures were originally banded at other stations while 26 were banded here
at Beaver Creek Reserve. So far, we know that we caught a bird that was banded
last year in 2023 in Michigan and one of our own from the 2023 season as well.
We are still waiting to hear back about where the rest of our recaptured birds
were originally banded.
We caught 137 females, 2 males and 15 unknown owls. Females
made up 88.9% of our captures and males made up .01%. New research, targeting
the banding of male Northern Saw-whet owls, may get us one step closer to
understanding why we see this disparity between sexes at banding stations. The
smallest bird we caught weighed 75.4 grams and our chunkiest bird weighed 116.2
grams. For reference, a stick of butter weighs about 113 grams.
We hosted 3 public programs to share knowledge about our
banding program and to explore the behavior, habitat and obstacles that the
Northern Saw-whet owl faces. We reached over 80 people through our outreach
efforts and hopefully inspired those who joined us for our owl banding
evenings.
25 new banders went through the Beaver Creek Reserve Northern Saw-whet owl training and put in over 800 hours of volunteer time throughout the season. Thank you to all of our amazing volunteers and landowners, we could not do this work without you! Another great season in the books, we look forward to the next one!
