Where do hawks go after crossing the Straits of Mackinac?   Here’s an awesome opportunity for MSRW to find out – with your help! This winter, a Red-tailed Hawk banded by Nick Alioto, for Mackinac Straits Raptor Watch, in April 2019 was recovered near Holly, Michigan (16 miles south of Flint).  We now know that this...

When conducting long term migration research using banding, returns are few for most species. With the numbers of people presently conducting research on N. Saw-whet Owls we get quite a few returns for that species. Most other species result in few returns although the larger species are more easily found after death and people sometimes...

Since my last blog post there is a lot more exciting news to share with all you fine folks as our Snowy owl winter season pushes on here in Northern Michigan. As I mentioned before in my last post there is exciting news about some Snowy owls that we have recaptured so far this season....

Let me start off by saying that it is great to back in Northern Michigan for another winter (yes, I really do enjoy the winters up here!). I am excited to be continuing our work from last winter of surveying and banding Snowy owls in the area. This year we began our season on December...

Sometime early in the summer Ed Pike asked me if I would be interested in coordinating the tagging of Monarch butterflies as they passed Point LaBarbe during the 2020 fall migration to their wintering grounds in Mexico.  I was a bit hesitant as first, but when I mentioned it to Laurie, the retired science teacher,...

Mackinac Straits Raptor Watch NewsletterNovember 30, 2020 Sharing Victories MSRW Launches New Website Thanks to a grant from Petoskey Harbor Springs Area Community Foundation, Mackinac Straits Raptor Watch just updated our seven-year-old website!  Now you can much more easily find the birds that we see, the people that we work with, and the amazing stories of both...

Observing Raptor migration at a hawk watch site can be an amazing spectacle, with kettles of hawks and eagles soaring overhead, eliciting “oohs” and “aahs” from humans present. In the fall, all we know is that the birds are heading south somewhere, after leaving breeding grounds to the north somewhere. Modern satellite tracking devices are...

Nov 9th was my last full day of counting, as Nov 10th was an overall miserable weather day. So with the season coming to an official end, I thought it would be great to break down this record year of waterbird migration. From Aug 20th, 2020 until Nov 10th, 2020 I counted 79 days and...

Nancy and I have had quite the season here on Point LaBarbe, and have caught more owls than we ever could have imagined we would catch! The MSRW fall average is 200-300 Northern saw-whet Owls captured, and a few Long-eared Owls if they’re lucky. For us to have caught 648 Northern Saw-whet Owls, 11 Long-eared...

I have to apologize for the missing blogs, there has been some technological glitches and WiFi errors here on my end. However, here is an update on what the November season has looked like so far. Long-tailed Ducks had moved through the area fairly consistently all throughout late October, but had begun to trickle in...

Its been a record-breaking year at MSRW’s Point LaBarbe owl-banding station but all good things must come to an end. Starting Halloween night, we noticed a marked decrease in the number of Northern Saw-whet Owls landing in our nets. Part of the reason has been some sub-optimal migration conditions – especially winds and a bright...

As bird banders, the most important thing to us besides our own safety is the birds’ safety. We do absolutely everything we can to minimize any stress or harm to the birds. One facet of this is to reduce the amount of time we have the birds, from first capture to release, and especially the...