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| Banding a Boreal Owl chick with Dave Russell in Fairbanks, Alaska |
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Day!!
Yesterday was the best day of the trip yet! We birded Creamer's Field in the morning where we saw 60+ Sandhill Cranes and a pretty nice sized flock of Common Redpolls. In the afternoon, we met up in Fairbanks with Jill and Dave Russell and Aaron Anderson who research Boreal Owls up here. We went out with Dave and Aaron to check three nest boxes. At the first box, one of the two chicks was peeking out of the hole. This was a life bird for me and Margaret. The near-fledging chicks were taken out, weighed and measured and I got to hold one of them! At the second box, the chicks were much younger. They were so cute! Two of them got banded and one was still too small to band. Along the way we saw a cow and calf moose crossing the road and a BEAUTIFUL Harlan's Red-tailed Hawk soaring! At the third nest box both chicks needed banded, and I got to band one of them!!! We went to the Russell's house for a wonderful spaghetti dinner made by their daughter, Amanda, and then had a fun evening drinking "the best ever" margaritas and discussing birds, birding and big years! Here are some shots of the owls!!
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| A nearly fledged baby Boreal Owl peeking out when we arrived! |
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| Getting weighed |
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| Mama Boreal Owl |
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| Getting measured |
Today it was rainy almost all day so we did some grocery shopping, stopped at the Fairbanks airport ponds for some birding and went to the University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum of the North. It was a wonderful museum with a lot of local natural history information and artifacts. There were also exhibits of Denali/Mt. McKinley climbs and the Aleut evacuation. It was extremely interesting!
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| Some Mammoth and Mastodon bones and skulls! |
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| The University of Alaska Museum of the North |
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI am going to Alaska for the first time this summer and I am so jealous that you get to see, never mind hold a boreal owl. How did you get in touch with the researchers? Is there any way you can share their information so I can see if they would be available to show me a nest site?
Regards,
John
Hi John, the researcher, Dave Russell, and his students work on the project through the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. I was only able to band a baby under extremely close supervision, because I had just finished an internship of migratory bird banding. But they may be open to showing you their operations, which includes weighing and measuring the babies!
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