The story of the birds this spring for the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory is “it has been slow”. With 405 birds banded so far, we are well on our way to experiencing one of the slowest years for captures. We have just beat 2011 which caught 360 birds before the station was evacuated on May 11 due to wildfires, ending 2011’s spring a month early. There are only thirteen more days to beat the next lowest year of 446 bands in 1996 (which also had particularly low mist-netting effort).

And it is not the case that we are seeing thousands of birds overhead, but none of them are finding the nets since the sky is likewise fairly empty and I do not expect the birds will move in big numbers again …

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