This last week in September is usually the peak of the season here. Despite lots of rained-out nights, we’ve had a few good nights over the last week. 19 Northern Saw-whets banded tonight so far, and 4-8 owls banded most nights over the last week.

Two Boreal Owls have been banded so far, which is up from last year (only one banded), but far from years like 2011 (56 Boreals banded) or 2017 (48 Boreals banded). Boreals tend to come later in the season, so more might be on their way.

Totals for the season so far:

After 15 years, we finally caught our first owl that was banded somewhere else.

This hatch-year Northern Saw-whet was originally banded in Anchorage. It was banded in a nest box in Forsythe Park in May 2024.

Banding totals as of Sep 16:

There have been quite a few rained-out nights so far this season; hopefully conditions improve.

At the suggestion of a couple of friends, I finally scraped together enough parts from the junk drawer to put together a BirdNET-PI system. This is a Tensorflow-based machine learning system that listens to the audio stream from an outdoor microphone and can identify over 6000 species. A station can be set up inexpensively; all that is needed for a minimal system is a Raspberry Pi board and an outdoor microphone.

This new station’s results can be seen on Birdweather:
https://app.birdweather.com/stations/7366

The results are pretty impressive so far, although I’ve seen a few false detections- the local squirrels are being detected as Belted Kingfishers.

The system is configured to ignore detections of Northern Saw-whet Owl, Boreal Owl, and Western Screech-owl for now since the owl banding operation uses audio lures of those species- no need to pollute the BirdNET results with our lure playback.

Owl banding time again.

The owl banding station here in Homer, Alaska was set up during the last week of August. Same small setup as previous years- four nets total.

We’ve opened nets eight nights starting August 22, and we’ve been rained out six nights so far.

As of Sep 8, we’ve banded 15 hatch-year Northern Saw-whet Owls.

We’re approaching the end of the owl banding season and things are slowing down here. It’s been below freezing for the last several nights. I’m seeing at most 1-2 owls per night now.

Totals for the season so far:

As of Oct 1, banding totals are as follows:

Two previously-banded Northern Saw-whets were captured; both were banded here in previous years- one originally banded in 2020, and one in 2022.

The season’s first Boreal Owl showed up on Sep 21.

Tonight I added Snowshoe Hare to the list of non-owls that I’ve had to extract from the mistnets.

Banding continues to be slow, with 49 Saw-whets and 2 Boreals banded during this season to date. The setup also caught a Great Horned Owl a few nights ago, but it extracted itself before I could get to it.

Weather continues to look bad for banding in the immediate future, likely continuing the trend of daily rain (or snow, in today’s case).

Banding continues to be a slow-going process here, with many unproductive nights.
Rain, wind, and moose have prevented opening nets for owl banding on many nights this month.

Many rainy nights, and when there isn’t rain, there’s wind. And when there isn’t wind, the local moose are hanging out in the middle of the trapping setup.

So far, 26 Northern Saw-whet Owls and 1 Boreal Owl have been banded during the Fall 2022 season. Additionally, we’ve had one returning owl that was originally banded here two years ago.

The last week of September is typically the most active for banding here. Here’s hoping things pick up a bit soon.

We’re off to a slow start; poor weather conditions have limited the number of banding nights so far.

As of Sep 12, a total of 8 Northern Saw-whets and one Boreal Owl have been banded. Additionally, one previously-banded Saw-whet made a return visit.

Hopefully we’ll see an increase in activity (and better weather) over the next couple of weeks.