Innovation Anthology #490:
Now that he’s finished a second season of bird banding in Alberta’s oil sands region, Ken Foster is anxious to start analyzing the results.
Ken is a biologist and president of Owl Moon Environmental out of Calgary.
DR KEN FOSTER: The program is called Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship or MAPS for short. It’s a bird banding program. We’re working to establish how birds use reclaimed and natural habitats in the boreal forest for nesting, breeding, and rearing of young. And over the long term, looking at how birds return to the same habitats year over year. That’s the survivorship part of the program.
This year saw 24 bird banding stations running from north of Fort McKay to south of Conklin.
The biologists use mist nests and Ken says some of the captures are quite encouraging.
DR KEN FOSTER: We did catch some individuals that were banded last year predominantly in the same general area that we banded them. So the birds are going away, spending the winter down south and coming back to very same habitat in which they were banded the year previous. And this includes birds at reclaimed areas.
Among the returning banded songbirds is a species called Swainson’s Thrush which migrates all the way to South America.
Thanks today to Syncrude
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Syncrude
Program Date: 2012-08-21