Notes from Bird Studies Canada Annual Meeting

We attended the Bird Studies Canada (BSC) Annual General meeting last week in Port Rowan.
There was, of course, lots of dry but necessary reporting. But some exciting stuff as well.
The feature presentation came from Dr. Doug Tozer on BSC’s  Lakes Loon Survey  that is now in its 33rd year.  The database for this work is large encompassing  4,550 lakes and 25,000 breeding pairs, I believe. (http://www.birdscanada.org/volunteer/clls/resources/CLLSsummary.pdf)

The work, which looks at loon chicks as reported by volunteers across the country, reveals how our lakes are doing.  Probably because of mercury pollution and acid rain eastern loon chicks aren’t doing that well.  While still producing at levels that will maintain decent populations, birth rates are going down. 

Meanwhile, loon reproduction does much better in Western Canada but these reproduction rates are going down considerably faster than in the east.  I’m not a scientist but what I get from the research is that mercury and maybe acid rain continue to have an effect on our lakes even after their prevalence in the atmosphere has been reduced.  More research is needed.

An exciting development is a $3.5 million dollar research project that will use new technologies to study migratory routes of birds and bats.  BSC President and CEO George Finney briefly described the project in his remarks.
Scientists from Western, Guelph and Acadia  have come together on this.  You can read an undated description of the project written by Mitchell Zimmer at http://www.uwo.ca/sci/news/silent_seasons.html

Zimmer quotes biologist Chris Gugliemo:

“The big overarching goal of this is a twenty year commitment to link all of Canada’s birds to their migration and wintering areas to create a migration atlas which doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.”

In the article, Guigliemo notes that some species have an 80% mortality rate during their extended migration.

“(Y)et those flights are largely a black box. Where do the birds go on their way south, where do they stop to rest and refuel, why do they die?”

The research is important to learn more about species at risk and also climate change.

As I said, this is exciting stuff.