5 November 2024

Week 5 here at Petit Manan Point’s Project Owlnet Banding Station, and we are going out with a bang! Well, we’re not all done yet – we’ve got another week to go – but this has been a very momentous week. And the reason for that is…we caught a Boreal Owl!!! In fact, it was the 4th Boreal Owl mist-netted in the state of Maine, ever!

But, let me not get ahead of myself. Sunday and Monday had good-looking weather forecasts, so we were thinking this week could be the last good chance to get birds for the season. We’re really working and living around the weather out here, and while forecasts may say one thing, the actual weather on the peninsula is another thing. We headed out to the trailer Sunday evening to assess conditions for ourselves, via our onsite weather station. Winds were a bit high but were expected to drop at some point in the night, so we opened our nets once wind speeds dropped down to 11mph. However, the wind speed shot back up to 23mph in a half hour, so we concluded that the forecast wasn’t reliable and disappointedly closed the nets for the night.

We thought Monday would be a bit better, thanks to a forecast predicting more north-leaning and less high wind speeds. As one of the last good days of the season, we planned to have a group from Downeast Audubon out for a visit. Huge thanks to them for helping fund this project, as we couldn’t all be here this year without this kind of help! So, Monday. We had a nice even flow of birds throughout the night. The air was crisp and cool, and the birds were young and feisty! 29 hatch-years, and 1 second-year. We were able to get our last male-sized nano tag out on the second-year bird, and felt great having one of our biggest nights of the season with so many friendly visitors to share the owl joy!

For most of the season, we’ve targeted both Boreal Owls and Long-Eared Owls at a separate set of nets from our standard ones, playing their respective calls. With some news through the grapevine that this is a remarkably good year for Boreals, we recently swapped those nets for ones with a smaller mesh size (better for catching boreals) and started solely playing the boreal call to target them.

Around 03:00 EST on Monday night – a while after all of the visitors and volunteers left – I went to check the “boreal nets”. I turned the corner to look down the last section, and saw a bird in the net. As I walked closer, I quickly realized it was on the larger side. When its face came into view, I saw that it had an almost entirely pale bill. Assessing the more striking pattern, significantly fuzzier feet, and overall size, it was unmistakable: a Boreal Owl! On a night like this, with a chill in the air, frost on the grass, a steady north wind, it seemed fitting. I brought it back to the trailer and the three of us remaining here at the station were buzzing with excitement! We had additional measurements to take for such a special bird, so once we collected those we were able to send it on its way. We walked it into a stand of alders and watched it swiftly fly north, off to live the rest of its life. From observations and calculations, we were able to determine that this was a second-year male bird! And with that, our big night of excitement came to an end.

The rest of the week was less eventful due to bad weather, with winds being too strong for us to open, or preventing birds from migrating towards us. We did make an attempt to open on “H-Owlween”, and caught one surprise bird. It was an adult male saw-whet, and the smallest of the season – weighing in at a teensy 76g! We celebrated the night otherwise, enjoying a witchy visit from a friend of the station, donning our costumes, and eating way too much candy. We finished out the week on the next day with good enough winds for opening, landing 6 more hatch-years to add to our numbers.

All of us here have been feeling just so lucky and thankful to even get to see a Boreal Owl, let alone catch one. Photos don’t do it justice, and it’s definitely a night that we’ll be replaying in our heads for a long while. We love our saw-whets, of course, but it’s not every day that a boreal flies into your nets! We still have so much more to learn about both of these species, so it feels great to be out here collecting the data that we can. With the end of our season drawing near, we’re hoping we can get another solid night in to reach 300!