Northern Saw-whet Owl Banding Season Recap

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!