A female burrowing owl tagged two years ago as a chick in Alberta, Canada, has been photographed by a Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist 185 miles southwest in the Upper Missouri River Breaks.
According to a BLM blog post, wildlife biologist Craig Miller was conducting sage-grouse surveys in a remote Breaks area in north-central Montana when he noticed some burrowing owls in a small prairie dog town. Miller works at the BLM field office in Havre.
“As I grabbed the binoculars, I thought: There’s no way I can see a little band on an owl with the naked eye,” he said. “To my surprise, BINGO, striped owl.”
A marked burrowing owl nested in Montana after being banded two years ago in Alberta, Canada.
Craig Miller
Wildlife researchers use banding to study and identify individual birds. Scientists place aluminum or colored bands on the birds’ legs. Each metal band is engraved with a unique set of numbers.
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Miller took several photographs of the barred owl using a telescope. He could only see a bluish band with an R and a pair of 2s, as well as some numbers on a silver band on the bird’s other leg. He wasn’t sure how to find out more about the owl, so he contacted a former colleague at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
A few emails later, the email network had expanded to include nearly a dozen wildlife professionals from the BLM, USFWS, the University of Idaho, a global owl conservation organization, and an owl researcher at Canada.
“With the help of all the experts in the email chain, we were able to identify the ringed owl,” Miller said. “It was a pretty interesting experience.”
David H. Johnson, founder of the Global Owl Project, works with 450 people in 65 countries to research, track and preserve owl habitat. Among Johnson’s professional contacts in Canada, researchers identified the owl as one that had been ringed in Alberta.
The burrowing owl was ringed on July 11, 2022 by members of the Conservation and Science team working for the Wilder Institute.
“The chick was banded approximately 30 days after hatching (based on the length of its flight feathers)… a few miles west of Suffield, Alberta,” said Graham Dixon-MacCallum, a population ecologist at the Wilder Institute in Alberta, Canada. he wrote.
“The most important thing now will be to see if this female nests and produces young at her current site in Montana,” Johnson said.
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