 catechus. And the genus name of Golius actually is Latin and comes from the Greek word for owl, which the word that they use is actually for a bird of ill omen. For owls in general, we're kind of seen as a sign of bad luck and we're very much associated with things like funerals and kind of dark. Hard to say that looking at this cute little guy here. And then catechus actually this species name is related to where the first specimen was collected, which was in Nova Scotia, and Nova Scotia falls within the region of Catechia. This common name, sawwet, might sound a little interesting, but sawwet or wedding of a saw, I'm not sure what the actual verbiage could be for that, but a wedding of saw is referring to actually sharpening of a saw blade and early naturalists likened the call of the sawwet to the sharpening of saw blades. I did do a quick Google search because I wasn't sure myself what sounded like to sharpen a saw. Unfortunately, most of the sound clips I found were related to horror movies. So I did not add that in here, but I did put in what we think is potentially the call that they likened the sawwet to, which is the mouse you call and that's what the sound is. So I myself, I don't know if that is a sharpening of saw, but that is what they thought it did sound like. So these birds are fairly small, they're about eight inches tall with a wingspan of 17 inches and non-breeding season males will be about 2.75 ounces or 77.8 grams and females will fall at 3.4 ounces and 94 or 95, sorry, 0.4 grams. During the breeding season females will gain about 50% in mass and in general females are larger and that is the only real way to determine male versus female outside the breeding season because their plumage does stay the same between the two. So for breeding these birds are associated with the boreal forest and you can see here in green the boreal forest stretches most of Canada and even to Alaska, but even though this is considered mostly a boreal species they are found outside of the boreal forests. So this range map shows that they do in fact breed through most of Northern Canada in the boreal regions, but they also breed in parts of Alaska, New England, 2PA, parts of the Appalachian Mountains, they also be found in the Highlands of North Carolina in Tennessee. They can be found breeding through scattered roots in the western Dakotas in Nebraska as well as most of the western coastline as well. They're mostly widespread through the western coastline and also during their non-breeding season as well. You can find them mostly in Southern Canada, the mid-Atlantic, midwest and the western mountains. However, they will turn up in some very interesting places and you can find them anywhere including Louisiana and Northern Florida as well and as many people have found out they do pop up in some very strange places New York City and in fact found out, I believe there's two Christmases ago now when Rocky the Christmas owl showed up in the Rockefeller Christmas tree. One thing that we are still trying to understand is their migration. Many birders strive to see this bird, however I'm sure many of you have found it very difficult to find them because they do roost during the day and they roost in very dense cover. They are very hard to spot because of their plumage. It makes them blend in very well. They also rarely call outside of the breeding season so locating them at night can also be difficult and because of this the range is hard to determine and things like migration are even harder to determine and that has led many naturalists to really debate whether this species is migratory. Stepping back from that briefly I do want to cover a little more about the breeding especially here in Maine or I guess for you in Maine. The main bird atlas which is a five-year project that began in 2018 to catalog the species of breeding birds in Maine has found that the birds are found breeding either possible or probable not confirmed necessarily throughout most of the state even in really rural areas. There are only six confirmed breeding saw wets that have been detected through this. However as I've noted they are pretty hard to detect and so it's not surprising that there may be more. However the breeding they do their courtship will begin in mid-march to April. They do start breeding fairly early with the incubation beginning April to mid-May. These birds do breed early with sometimes even residual snow being on the ground. Trick-bearing will occur from May to June. They are cavity nesters preferring holes created by woodpeckers specifically affiliated or even northern flicker. However, cavities created by tree branched falls as well will also work. The habitat they mostly are found in mixed dense forest. The mixed dense providing great habitat for not only hunting but also for roosting and nesting as they prefer more dense cover for hunting and roosting and obviously needing these large trees with cavities for nesting. You will find them sometimes in younger spruce for forests as well especially if they have the residual taller older trees that will have the cavities that they need. Swamp edges and shrub swamp also provide great hunting habitat and snags or dead trees or anything else that will provide cavities will also lend for breeding as well. It can be hard to find exact breeding habitat however thankfully these birds do take well to nest boxes and box placement within that preferred habitat including margins of forested areas especially near swamps or dense forests and shrubs will really provide great habitat for them. You really just want to avoid urban areas or really small patches of woods because they do need a large enough area for hanging in the boxes. Hanging them 8 to 15 to be high will provide a good location. It's important to remember of course that you need to access these for cleaning them out during the certain times of the year so as long as it's within reach of a ladder and safely within reach of a ladder anywhere between 18 to 15 feet will be fine. With the box you do want to face it with the opening to the south with very few obstructions this allows for a clear flight path for the bird to the box. Additionally you don't really want to block the opening for monitoring purposes. You ideally would like to be able to monitor these birds from 30 feet away and really get to appreciate them. As Bill had mentioned earlier outdoor cats are obviously a well understood issue and so if you can avoid areas with outdoor cats or place the box on a tree that is not very climbable that would be provided safer area for them or even considering a predator guard as well. Additionally being so small these birds do ball parade of larger raptors including barred owls and great horn owls so if you have a nesting pair or a territorial owl in the area it's best to avoid placing a box there. If you are interested in creating a box or placing a box either on your property or somewhere you know there are wonderful resources out there. Project Nest Watch did the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Main Natural History Observatory have a lot of these plans and specifics about how to hang your boxes and where a good habitat would be. In addition the Main Natural History Observatory does have owl monitoring efforts and that they will go over a great video and they have a great document as well that will go into sort of natural history and detail some specific somewhere to hang your boxes as well. So getting back to the main focus of this presentation a lot of my work has been with migration and the reason for that is like I said these birds it was really misunderstood whether they would migrate or not. In fact early naturalists believe the species was mostly widespread as a sedentary which makes sense since most owls are that way. However that idea started to change and is suspected beginning in the early 1900s that these birds might actually migrate and part of that was based on two events first in 1903 a small boat crossing Lake Huron actually encountered a small flock of these owls and most likely they were saw wets that the actual quote was just a small flock of owls or a flock of small owls sorry. The following year in 1904 a large storm over Lake Huron caused the death of quite a few thousand migrating birds and within that some of those were saw wets and so that began to really make naturalists suspect that these birds are in fact migrating they're not just sort of sedentary species within their own little territories. However this concept of migration in these birds was really debated highly up until the 1960s when targeted banding efforts began for these birds. Obviously though without any sort of lore or anything the capture rates were pretty low so in the 1980s a mail advertisement call was added to lure additional birds to the nets. If you're familiar with the mail advertisement call for this bird I've heard it likened to the backing up of a trash vehicle or a dump truck. You can hear it here very sort of monotonous tooting and I during the fall hear out that a lot. Now with all these efforts though it was still very misunderstood what the range of these birds were in fact many areas and many states were concerned that these birds were either endangered or were threatened within their boundaries. In fact in the 1990s if you can recall possibly Pennsylvania actually had a license plate with the northern salt owl on that and that was to raise awareness and to raise efforts in order for these birds to be placed on the threatened species list in Pennsylvania. So all that interest in understanding these birds like history led to the creation of what is called Project ALNET. Project ALNET was established in 1994 as a way to better understand and add to our knowledge of these species. It is the brainchild of David Branker who was an colleges with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and is currently co-managed by David as well as Steve Hoyt in Maryland and Scott Winesall Pennsylvania. The Ness Miss Center for Nature and the Art provides institutional backing as well as the Penn State University Center for Environmental Imaging and this project serves as a collaborative effort to connect researchers across North America by providing standardized methodologies, capture techniques, aging and sexing resources and analytical tools and data archiving services to really help build our knowledge and connect banding stations to share data and techniques with each other and provide a standardized protocol to collect standardized data on these birds. Across North America there are about 125 banding stations all run by various field technicians and a lot of volunteers. Each station is run by various organizations from nature centers to universities to even Ottawa society I'm sure somewhere I have them. They're supported by various people who are very interested and very dedicated to these birds and for the rest of this presentation I'm really going to shift focus and highlight the banding station that I worked at in Maine because that one is most recent for me and is a very special as you'll learn soon very special location for banding solid owls. So in 2020 I accepted the role as a resident vander at the Petit Manon banding station and I'm going to put it out there. I have been told that I say this location wrong I learned as Petit Manon however I was told I do not say it like a local and locals apparently say Petit Manon. I will switch back and forth and I apologize it's a bad habit to break. So this location is part of the Petit Manon National Wildlife Refuge which is located near a small fishing village in Millbridge as you see in that left hand map there and it's not far from Acadia National Park which is a real treat that sunset because the cove near our banding station you can actually see the sunset over Cadillac Mountain and so this wildlife refuge is actually part of the larger main coastal islands national wildlife refuge complex and consists of more than 250 miles of coastlines and some very unique habitats. So as you see from these photos those diverse habitats include anywhere from coastal islands, forested headlands, estuaries and freshwater wetlands. It's a really beautiful and secure or secluded place to work and a really unique place to get to experience at night and especially. This last photo here as you can see this is actually from that cove I described earlier. You can see in the distance a little bit Cadillac Mountain with the sun setting over it. This cove in particular is actually named Bear Cove and the reason for that is on days with a lot of waves those small rocks and boulders get picked up and rolled around and cause a loud roaring sound and so that was the namesake for Bear Cove is because of that large loud sound. So on the banding station this is actually a picture of where we band. This has been in place since 2015. We will actually work out of a converted camper. Being the remote area of the station is converted to run off solar to run all the lights at night and it also uses propane to provide heat run the refrigerator and also the stove. The exact hours for operation of the station will differ from not every project outlet station has exact protocols for when we band. The station in particular will run from dusk every night to about 3am bird time. I'm going to define bird time for you because we say bird time because birds don't observe daylight savings time. Bird time is essentially standard time. So in reality we band from dusk until 4am most nights. However the exact hours of operation are going to vary for things like weather. We take great care to watch for wind conditions and also precipitation and flight conditions. Things like fog will prevent birds sometimes from migrating or at least we've noticed them coming less than our nets. And so we do watch very carefully for weather conditions and that impacts our effort. We will not open for high winds or we might close early for high winds and rain things like that. And like I said this is keep the birds safe and also on nice when we don't really expect many birds it allows us banders to get a little break if we're not going to be catching birds. So the one of the first things that we'll do at night is right at dusk we open our nets. If you've ever experienced a banding station before you may be familiar with misnets. Misnets are named so because they are made of a very thin material that when they're open they almost disappear. And you can see on the right here this right hand photo is actually from a different study obviously bobbling. Those are not solids. But you can kind of see from that photo how the net when it's open almost disappears and at night you can see how that would be very difficult to see and that provides a great way to capture any unsuspecting owls. The picture on the left those are the nets actually at Petit Manan and currently they're in that photo rolled up or furled as we call them and we keep them like that during the day to prevent birds mammals or insects from getting captured in them while we're not monitoring them. And so Petit Manan that station actually has nine nets in total. Six of them are set up in order to catch sawwets and will be running end to end and this is part of that sawwet array that you see here. We also run an additional three nets in a separate location. The nets that we use there are a little bit larger and are set up in order to target some larger birds. After opening the nets one of the fun parts of the night is to turn on the moors and we will listen to these noises throughout the night so I'm going to share them with you. You may you remember the saw what called that lovely tooth. The other birds that we do target at Petit Manan are boreal owls and long-eared owls and so you'll hear a rotating the war there will rotate between the call of the boreal owl and the call of the long-eared owl. And so the third of the night we really do hear of all working on the station of course of owls singing to us and some of the stations I've worked at in places like Pennsylvania we've had some neighbors who have not always appreciated hearing owls calling all night or they just haven't realized what they were but it is fun to have that calling all night. So once the nets are open we'll start checking the nets regularly. Usually we do it about every 30 minutes to 40 minutes depending on weather conditions and also how many birds we're catching. The photo on the left here actually shows the inside of the banding station. Once we start going on our runs and we encounter an owl we will extract them very carefully it takes a lot of training to understand how to pull birds out of the nets and owls even these owls the small and cute as they are they are predators and they do have some dangerous little nails on there and so we do take some extra precautions for that. After extracting them though they do go into bird bags and this keeps them calmer and safer while we wait to ban them. The photo here on the left is from a very busy night in 2020 which was the year that I was there and this night we actually had 89 birds and so this time can give you an idea of what it may look like a camper full of owls. So once we start banning them or processing them we'll take a bird out and the first thing that we do is put a band on them and these bands provide an identification number. Each number is unique to that bird and is gone through the bird banning lab which is operated by the US Geological Survey. The pires that you can see there are if you're familiar with their banding they're specific to the size of the band so that the band will close perfectly and will not overlap or anything like that and so one of our main focuses is obviously getting the band on. After that we do take an additional number of measurements obviously the weight that's the first thing that we really want to get. After that we start looking at things like the wing cord which is what you can see here and the wing cord is the length of the wing however it's the length accounting for the natural bend that occurs. We also take a modified version of measurement which is called the wing flat and it's the same measurement but we take the curve out of the wing and we'll actually flatten it and in addition to that we also take things like the tail measurement and we also will evaluate the fat. Birds will store fat in several places one of the places that we look and usually will be able to determine the fat contents on this bird is actually in the wing pit so within that we'll rate that fat from anywhere from zero to five and that's really important because obviously these birds are needing stores to make this migration and so they'll be putting on not only weight but especially weight in fat and so by looking at the fat's a good way to tell how these birds are bearing especially if they're using the habitat that we're banding in they may be stopping over and it's good to see if we're catching a bird over several days if they put on fat and if they're able to use the habitat and it's providing good enough habitat for them to hunt and put on the fat and serve as a good stock over location so fat can be a good indicator for not only the health of the bird but also the health of the environment. Another thing that we want to do is sex these birds and as I mentioned before it's impossible to do so by plumage and so the way that we do that is by actually combining that wing cord which is that measurement of the wing that I described earlier and combining that with weight and we have a lovely chart that goes through genetics are used to back up the evaluation of weight versus wing cord to see how big the bird is and determine what sex of it is as a result. There is a little bit overlap and those birds that it might be a very small female or a very large male will fall into what's the unknown category we can't sex them unfortunately however in a later date if another station catches them or will within the few nights that they are stopping over near the station if we catch them again and either lose or gain weight it may be possible to then determine the sex. So another really important thing that we want to do especially for understanding the demographics and things of the population dynamics of these birds is the the age and with many birds the way to do that is by looking at the feathers because mold patterns are specific to certain ages and in these raptors these owls in particular we will look at the flight feather mold from these pictures it can be kind of hard to see however there are some darker feathers in there and those are going to be the newer feathers and so from a zoomed in photo you may be able to see a little better that these feathers indicated here are actually darker than the rest of them those are going to be the newer feathers and we'll use different mold patterns in there to determine the age however even to the trained eye this can be very hard to see sometimes and especially with working at night with either very poor lighting or in some cases people only use headlamps to do this it can be very hard to discern these newer versus older feathers but thankfully you may not know owls actually glow in the dark as if they couldn't get cooler they glow in the dark and this is actually a photo of that owls have a pigment called porphyrin that gets stored in the feathers and helps to create the color this porphyrin will degrade when exposed to sun and weather conditions and so over time it's possible to determine the age based on the amount of porphyrin in there and porphyrin fluoresces under UVA or a black light and so it makes it possible to really easily see sometimes newer versus older feathers and so you can see here the ones that have highlighted are lighter in color are almost white those are going to be your older feathers because they're limited in porphyrin brand new feathers will have a lot more now move on to this photo here just to give you another look of what it might look like like I said they do mold in specific ways so the way that will actually determine the age is by looking for certain patterns brand new hatch your bird which is a bird that was hatched that year and is making its first fall migration they will have a consistent feathers they're all brand new and so the glow will be consistent and let me know real variation no white feathers sticking out of there a second year bird or a bird that was hatched the previous year is now making its second fall migration will have a window in the middle the outermost uh flight feathers and the innermost flight feathers will be bright pink and then there'll be a space of white feathers in between them as they get older and after second year bird or bird that we know for sure is older than two years old will have a mixture of feathers throughout they won't have a necessary um window that you can see it is also possible using this black light to see up to three generations of feathers so you can see brand new feathers which are bright pink you'll see older feathers which might be light pink to white and then you'll see what we call very old feathers which is bright way and so that allows us to tell for sure if these birds are actually over three years old or not um so one of the things that Project Alnett has started back in 1994 was looking at eye color they thought that it potentially be related to health or even age of the birds and so we started collecting this and no patterns have been discerned however the more data we collect it's always possible to eventually maybe identify a pattern so we do still collect and evaluate eye color and the way we do this is actually by using this chart you can see on the left so this chart is actually a Benjamin Moore paint swatch and every fanning station will use the same colors it's a selection of bold yellow Viking yellow golden orchards and Oxford gold and so we'll look at those eyes and try to compare them and discern what we think they are and feel free to you know send into the chat what you think um these uh this owl's eye color is uh in reference to this uh chart every night we'll go through a lot of these birds and we'll compare them and we end up writing down just the three uh number code um most owls I find fall either under the bold yellow or Viking yellow um 336 or 321 and obviously from the lighting and they might not be very easy to discern um but I would call this media I would lean towards a Viking yellow and that's my instinct but it's hard to tell from pictures and I couldn't tell you exactly what we called this bird at the time oh I'm actually seeing some chest coming in oh everyone's saying bold yellow yeah a lot of the birds that we do see are bold yellow um we do uh see birds that don't sort of follow this chart um I don't know if you remember the first slide but that bird was very special because the color of their eye his eyes was almost a orange dark orange a pumpkin color we've also seen birds that have a closer to a green so we don't always or we are not always able to categorize these birds by this chart but most of our birds we can usually fall into some category all right let's see oh sorry I'm in trouble uh forwarding to the next downside so after we put these owls through all the uh paces and they get their new bracelets and they've gotten all their measurements the next thing we do is get them ready to leave um some of the birds look like the one on the left and they're not very happy to go um oh they are very happy to go they're not very happy with us but we do take them out and we'll find um moving them close to uh good cover because like I said before these they tend to be a prey species so we take our best care to take them to somewhere safe and we'll give them about five minutes or so to let their eyes readjust since they are an optional species and after giving them an adjustment period we give them a perch and you can see on the right there the arm is a very common perch and some of these birds you can't even get them set down before they aren't gone and then other birds will soon enjoy the night air especially on extremely cold nights when I would rather be in the warm camper and but can't really be mad if you got a cute little bird sitting on your arm so from all this data we do start to learn a lot of things and that's the next sort of uh phase of this presentation it's going to go over some of the data that we have collected not only treatment on but the trends that we see across the network um this graph in particular is showing the banding um results and capture um of solid owls at the treatment on station in particular so you can kind of start to see certain um patterns here if you notice 2020 and 2016 are much higher than the rest of them and these are what we're going to call boomers um these boomers uh do occur pretty regular and they're caused actually by spruce cones because a year following a spruce cone crop that's very large will yield a lot of uh a lot of rodents and especially red fat voles in the breeding grounds um and more voles tends to mean more baby owls so on average most clutch sizes will be five to six um however on a good year might actually uh lean towards the higher end of almost nine and on really good years these birds may even nest twice in a female may have a second clutch so on these boomers we're seeing an influx of baby owls causing the population to skyrocket for that year which happens about every three to five years and because it's caused by this first cone crop it is actually uh possible to guess the following year's migration um based on the large or the size of the spruce cone crop a large spruce cone crop will indicate that the following year might be a very good migration so 2020 and 2016 were our largest years 2020 saw upwards of 458 new owls encountered 2021 which was last year was the year following the boom year which does tend to be does tend to drop significantly the following year um and so that kind of fell where we expected it being a low to a mid-year another pattern you can kind of see just from this data because this is set by date um our peak of migration usually happens in main about the first week of october and if you can see in 2020 there's this very large jump um during that we night we actually saw 121 owl sowing right on the uh best week for migration and one of the things that really will um alter the amount of births we see will be wind direction and speed and so that night was a perfect storm uh so to speak of perfect northwest winds at a nice um speed not too fast but um not you know lacking in wind either and that brought the owl right to us and things like moonlight can also influence that as well too much moonlight or not enough will impact potentially the flight that we also see so another pattern that we start to look at will be the age distribution and as I mentioned on those peak years we tend to see a majority of the birds being hatching which makes sense after you're being birds that are born that are hatched that year it makes sense because on those big years there's a influx of young owls and so those large years um 2016 or 2020 a good majority of the birds we encounter will not be adult owls but will actually be juveniles or hatched year birds making their first uh migration in person uh years following peak years or preceding uh prior to uh big years will have a larger amount of adults um versus uh young birds when you break that out by sex though another interesting thing arises um you can see on the left here this is the percentage of adult and hatchier birds that we see in our female and each year we see a quite a decent number of adult female owls obviously during the um larger years we see more hatchier birds but um still we see a decent amount of adult birds when you look at the male owls there is a significant difference we tend to see very few adult male owls and in general uh you can see from this graph we don't see very many male owls at all um the light blue color there being females and the males being that orange um there are a couple birds that obviously uh fall into that unknown category that I described earlier but well the owls the male owls they are just not there and so some of the things that are to be considered at the thought of are the fact that for one we do use a male advertisement call and it would make sense if that does attract more females however when looking at studies that um compare banding uh efforts with or without a lore or with a different call besides the male call we see a slight bias potentially to females and maybe a few more males will show up to either a passive net or a net with no lore or net that's not using the male advertisement call necessarily however it doesn't account for the large differences that we are seeing and so one of the things that's thought is that the um male owls will actually stay closer to the breeding grounds um as a smaller sex it makes sense that maybe they're not migrating as much because it is a taxing process and as a smaller bird it's a more effort for them in addition um this has been described in a closely related species of boreal owl the males do tend to stay closer to the breeding grounds in order to get a head start in the spring and begin establishing territories and calling and um interacting females and so you know the more uh south you get you see fewer and fewer um male owls especially adult male owls and this is something that I have personally um experienced and uh observed having worked in Pennsylvania it was a real rare treat if we saw a male owl in fact I think in I believe it was 2018 we saw not only adult male owl but I think he's six years old and this was the most exciting thing for us um however once I got to um me not only was it more common but we actually saw a significant amount um in fact you'll see um based on the data that in 2020 we saw about 60 male owls a lot more hatch year um but that compared to the nearly uh 290 female owls that were encountered that year is still a significantly fewer number of male owls that we do see so one of the other things I will really start to look at um is going to be the migration obviously which is one of the main focuses of why we do this work and banding data does provide a lot of good information um about maybe their migratory routes or their patterns and how far they're going and really indicating that range and so we do know from the data that they do tend to follow major topographical features including lakes coastlines and ridges they also do become loyal to migratory flyways but they do make long-distance movements as you can see here this is a graph from Fatima Naan um the banding station highlighted there and on the right all those points are birds that had been banded elsewhere then recaptured at um Fatima Naan that's not necessarily in the same season but potentially between seasons and you can see the farthest distance being from a bird that was banded in Duluth, Minnesota and then recaptured Timanaan and you can see how they make these very large jumps and part of that may be because young birds tend to do weird things their first migration they get blown off course or they may take a different migration throughout the following year however over time it has been shown that owls do tend to or these birds do tend to become loyal to their migratory flyways and their migratory pathways. One of the largest jumps though that has been recorded was a bird that was banded in Montana and was captured the following fall um almost 1,864 miles away in Boston so they do make some crazy jumps. This graph is also from Timanaan this is actually showing birds that we have banded at our station and then were recovered subsequently in other places. The green are birds that were captured within the same season before December 31st and then yellow being birds that were captured in subsequent years and you can see that the birds that we capture in Maine do tend to follow the coastline and will get captured subsequently in more southern areas along the coast. So obviously we can't understand everything banding does become kind of limited we are limited to resources we're limited to banding stations and we're limited to our ability to observe owls we don't always capture them and we it's very it's not rare but recapture rates are pretty low so we don't get to see how one individual travels from year to year or even within the same season and so we really start to look towards new technologies to potentially start to get some of those answers and once that once that technology is the most popular tracking system which incorporates radio telemetry using small radio tags that are then picked up by automated receiving stations not only within the US but internationally and these tags are pretty special because not only are they lower costs which allows researchers to put a larger number of them out there but they are also extremely small and in the past it's been very difficult to study small songbirds or even saw west where it started starting to fall on that end of small for a lot of the older tracking technologies but these new bands are very small they're even small enough to go on things such as green darner dragonflies and modern butterflies which is very unique to this sort of technology and the hope is that within the future we can start to see some of these answers to our questions that we were unable to answer in the past without tracking technology so that is all I have for this presentation but I do want to take a moment to thank all the individuals that do make this effort possible the Pateetman Island banding station is a collaborative effort supported by the main national history observatory the main department of inland fisheries and wildlife project alnett and the main coastal islands wildlife refuge as part of the US Fish and Wildlife Service as a principal investigator David Brinker does contribute a substantial amount of his own time to running with along with seasonal technicians and a group of wonderful local and not some or some not so local volunteers as well and another thank you as well to all the private donors and organizations that provide the funding to really keep the station running year to year it would be impossible to do it without everybody else to keep it running thank you Zoe that was great we do have a few questions okay um one of the questions that actually I got last night an early bird question was uh to pronounce uh how is the genus correctly pronounced is pronounced egolius um looking at it I always want to say a gollias or a gollias or something that but it's not egolius egolius gollias yes and um you mentioned in your description that the northern solwatt is the smallest raptor in the eastern united states eastern north america yes what is what is smaller in the west what is smaller than a solwatt um so solwatt usually is about the weight of a blue jay and believe it or not there are birds are smaller um in terms of owls uh they are larger than pygmy owl and they're actually two times larger than the elf owl right could you um i'm sorry could you stop the screen sharing oh i'm sorry of course so we can see each other better great um also uh you mentioned about flocks uh migrating across the great lakes how often are are flocks like that observed that you're aware of and how many birds might have been observed in flocks um it's hard to tell uh flocks can be very large um there's new technologies especially things like radar we're able to see that there are sometimes thousands of birds that are uh moving all at once um the use of the lakes are still being uh studied and understood however we do know that birds do cross very large bodies of water and often unfortunately some of our best data comes from after uh they do encounter storms and we find them dead unfortunately however if anybody's been on a pelagic or even you know sometimes a fairy you'll see birds coming down and using the mobile stop oversight that is the boat so it is kind of common um i don't know how often it is to observe because they do fly sometimes at very high heights that we may not be able to observe and also a lot of it does happen at night so radar technology and things like that are still working to really understand how large and how frequent these flocks are do uh males mate with uh are they monogamous at all or do they mate with more than one female or vice vice versa um they're not very monogamous um in fact some females especially like i said in those peak years will have a second clutch and often that second clutch will be with another male before their clutch is fully fledged they may go off and have a second clutch with another male and so they're not monogamous season to season there's pretty short-lived birds um the average recapture rate that we see or recapture age is about 1.9 years um however i think the oldest bird that we have on record might be nine years in five months or something like that um and in captivity they can live up to 16 years um but in the wild because they are smaller they do tend to fall prey and so they are not very long lived and um a lot of times during warm monogamous birds you tend to be the longer cheese are males involved in raising the young yes a lot of uh provisioning of uh and bringing food to the nest is really important and they do uh contribute that um in fact like I said the females will sometimes once the birds they're the fledgling they haven't quite fledged yet um but might still be dependent they might move on to the next uh nest already leaving the male to continue providing uh food and uh is there one some predators in particular that are the ones that are mainly they mainly look out for yeah the greatest threat the greatest threat do tend to be avian predators barred owls are a huge predator and something that we do take um a lot of caution with in across the country and states that uh at these stations also great for owls as well and even uh something as small as an eastern screech owl has been observed um predating on uh sawlets as well mammals too but um a lot of times it's uh avian predators that they're concerned with and the uh luminescent feathers that you talked about and and showed the images of are those visible to other uh solid owls or two other species yeah for the medicines um we don't know to what extent necessarily but birds do see um in different wavelengths so it is thought that the poor friend may appear differently um not necessarily going pink potentially but that they might be able to detect it um a little better than we can with our naked eye right and is there an uh estimation of of what use that serves um the porphyrin itself i believe is a recycle used in the pigment the pigment that brown color that um is used in the feathers is a mixture of melanin and porphyrin beyond just the pigmentation um i don't know necessarily i know there have been studies and that's getting into uh the visual um how birds perceive different uh pigments and wavelengths so it's hard to say whether it's something along the lines of age or uh sex or anything like that because we can't visually based on plumage tell the difference between young females but there's possible that you know a bird can detect that based on the wavelengths that they can uh um see and uh what can you tell us about the overall population both the size of it and health of it um overall most uh states list this bird as a species of least concern um they tend to do well however because they do depend a lot on nesting cavities especially ones that are left by um woodpeckers they are subject to deforestation and habitat fragmentation so as i mentioned with the nest box uh putting these in a smaller patch of forest um does make them more susceptible to fragmentation and so they are really um they are uh sorry they're vulnerable to not only habitat loss but also uh climate change like most of our um birds um that we're experiencing throughout the um as the planet warms a lot their ranges are changing and altering their nesting breeding and migration patterns um so it's something that we want to continue to watch and in some regions they are more um limited in others especially there are subspecies that um may be limited to um they're the subspecies that is limited to only one island so some of the subspecies are definitely more at risk than the um main land species yeah well thank you very much for joining us tonight it was a true pleasure uh learned quite a bit and uh good luck with your efforts thank you look look forward to hearing more in the future absolutely good night everyone thanks for joining us