birdbling: Cool Links: Owls and Banding

Cool Links: Owls and Banding

Love Wine- Love Owls? Three Hoots to Life wine labels supports the National Audubon Society by contributing 5% of the proceeds of several different wine varieties - all labeled with beautiful owl photos.

Davis and Dyke Winery: support local wine, integrated pest management and owls!

This is the coolest link of Saw-whet owl nestlings looking out of their nest cavity. The video footage was taken by Marcel Holyoak. Be careful - you will fall in love! ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wojJIf_sj_I
NSWO Nestlings

One of my favorite links is to PROJECT OWLNET, founded to understand more about NSWO migration across the country. See our involvement under the "NSWO Monitoring tab."

Want to know pretty much everything about owls? Go to The Owl Pages

A great link for pioneering NSWO research (as well as other cool nature studies and art) is at the Ned Smith Center. This center supports Scott Weidensaul and his saw-whet research. His latest efforts were to install tiny geolocators on a backpack harness, which would track the movements of the NSWO. This site is also where I got the great idea for the Adopt an Owl program. It is a big success there!

The USGS Bird Banding Laboratory website is one site that all banders are familiar with but it is great for the general public. Here you can learn the ins and outs of banding, different projects, markers used to research birds, longevity records for all banded species, and who bands and why birds are banded. One of the most important resources is page that allows bands to be reported. So, say a bird hits your window and dies. It is banded. You go to the banding website and report the band here. Because you provided valuable important information, you will receive a certificate telling you where/when the bird was banded, who banded the bird, and the age/sex of the bird. Just think, your observation will tell how far a bird moved, and how old that bird might be!

There is more to come soon!

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Our Supporters

Every great program needs some great sponsors! Aside from abundant volunteer hours, annual funding is necessary for running the project, equipment, and maintenance of sites. Our partners include:

Altacal Audubon Society- Bander Support, Adopt an Owl and Adopt a Box program and some amazing volunteers (see below).

CSU Chico Research Foundation - funded the seasonal running of the program 2010-2012.

Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve - contributing to onsite maintenance of the owl stations and equipment needs.

Private sponsors whose contributions are necessary and appreciated include:

Butte Creek Foundation - $5000

Howard Wurlitzer - $3000

Mary Lou Martin - $300 to kick off the

Adopt-an-Owl program

Adopt an Owl Supporters - $2500(and increasing!)

Sacramento Audubon Society

Central Valley Bird Club members

Bob and Marilyn Alber

Katherine Garcia (thanks mom!)

Dorthy Davis and her fabulous painting donation

Wyatt Hersey and his great t-shirt design

Meet Ken Sobon

Ken is an avid birder, field trip leader and Vice President for Altacal Audubon Society. In 2020, he received his Master Bander Permit to have oversight of the all aspects of the project. He has volunteered with the owl project for seven seasons and beginning in fall 2017, he took on the program as Director with Julie Newman. In spring 2017 he added a new component to our program - nest boxes!, to determine if NSWO might be nesting on the Reserve. He will monitor the boxes each spring. Ken is also a science teacher for middle school kids in Oroville, California and enjoys sharing science and his love of birds with his students in the classroom and field since 1995.

NSWO Project Founder and Director 2005-2016, Birdbling Founder and Blogger!

Night Owl? Not really. But I am interested in feathered critters of the night ever since working my first job with the Northern Spotted Owl in Washington State - 1989! I am a birder, bird bander, biologist and conservationist; a complete fan of the avian taxa, love birds, especially songbirds. I am very concerned about the plight of birds and our anthropogenic impacts in the landscape (buildings, communication towers, habitat fragmentation, toxins, etc) and also the impacts that climate change will have. As a bird bander, I attempt to understand the demographics of local and migratory populations, productivity and survivorship of owls and songbirds. I always make sure that bird safety is top priority, striving to cause the least stress possible when handling birds. I have a phenomenal crew of volunteers whose philosophies agree with mine. We respect our nonhuman friends and endeavor to protect the habitats where they live on this earth.

Meet Julie Woodruff

Julie now runs her own station in the Oakland area, but prior: "Julie is an active volunteer in our banding program. We met when she joined the CSU Chico grad program in 2010 and was interested in studying Saw-whet Owls. We developed a great telemetry project based on the fall monitoring program: studying the winter roost selections and characteristics of the owls. She is also collecting pellets from the birds roosts and determining their winter prey. See more of Julie's project in our January 2011 blog posts."