Welcome to Week 5 of fall owl banding! We’re officially past the halfway point in the season, with only 3 weeks left to go. This week saw a marked decrease in our capture rate, with only 95 saw-whets banded compared to last weeks 193, an average of 13 per night. Even with the slow down in birds, our season total is now over 500 owls banded! We caught our 500th saw-whet around 2 am Saturday morning, and ended the week bringing our season total to 518 saw-whets, 3 barred owls and 1 long-eared owl.
After looking at the data for previous years, we realized we’ve surpassed the season totals for two out of the last three years (2021 and 2023 both catching about 415 owls) and we’re closely approaching the capture total for the third year (2022 with 590 owls). With this in mind, we decide to crunch some numbers, and found out we only need to average 10 owls a night through the end of the season to break the current fall banding record year of 672 owls in 2020! It’s hard to predict how the next three weeks will go, if our capture rate will continue to fall or if we’ll have one or two more nights of big numbers, but looking at past years really put into perspective how busy our season has been.
Photo: Hannah Leabhart
Some non-owl related highlights for the week included great views of the comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, which peaked on Monday night. We were able to bring out a scope to get better views, and had a lot of fun pointing it out to some visitors.
It’ll be really exciting to see how the next week or so goes, as we both really want to at least break 600 owls for the season! I’ve got my fingers crossed for a shift in winds to help bring our numbers up, but only time will tell.
Until next week,
Mary & Peyton
