The first Barred Owl of the season.

It’s hard to believe, but in less than an hour it will be April. While it still does not feel like spring in the woods at night, winter has definitely begun to loosen its grip at the Point and the owls have become a bit steadier. To date we have banded 65 Northern Saw-whet Owls and one Barred Owl. We have also heard a Great Horned Owl calling a few times during recent nights. Since moving the spring start date from April 1 to March 15 in 2007 the results in March have varied significantly, ranging from 371 to just 2 owls banded. That’s significant right? So, while this March has been more productive than the worst years, numbers this year are only about half of the average of March results from the last 10 years.

A couple of the season’s Northern Saw-whet Owls.

While not directly owl related, we know many of you who read this blog are also birders who love everything WPBO. Everyone here is very excited about our recent partnership with Dunkadoo. You can now view a live online feed of what is being seen by the counters at WPBO during the counts. Right now it is just the hawk count, but the waterbird count will also be up after it starts on April 15. The site also records the data, so that at anytime you can look back at see what has been going on at the Point. Although our schedule does not allow us to enjoy the live feed, we’re loving checking out the day’s sightings while we’re working the night shift. The link to the page is https://dunkadoo.org/project/wpbo-hawk-count

We were also excited to see an article by Scott Weidensaul in the recent issue of Michigan Audubon’s member magazine The Jack Pine Warbler. As I’m sure many of you know, Scott is a wonderful author and is a cofounder of Project Snowstorm. For those of you not familiar with this project, it is a very well organized study of the wintering habits of Snowy Owls.  We were thrilled to be asked to become official partners and team members of this study back in 2015.  Naturally, it is a very well written article with an overview of some of the things they have learned about wintering Snowy Owls including two, Chippewa & Whitefish Point, that we fitted with GPS transmitters in Pickford in 2015.

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     At this time of year we keep a nice boot selection up here. There is still total snow cover in the net lanes with drifts that are several feet deep. We’re also getting into that period when daytime temperatures are above freezing then dropping below during the night. So in the course of a night we are regularly switching between snowshoes, waterproof winter boots, mukluks and skis depending on the conditions.

Chris Neri & Nova Mackentley