Emily Choy’s research group went on a field trip to a farm this fall to learn how to handle the birds – and observatory – coming soon to the McMaster Forest Nature Preserve.
At the Haldimand Bird Observatory. Choy and 13 students from her lab spent a day with chief bird bander Rick Ludkin learning how to catch, identify, measure and band songbirds. Choy’s lab will do the same work much closer to campus once the university’s first bird observatory is up and running at the nature preserve next summer.
McMaster’s observatory will join a network of stations across North America that monitor migratory birds. Data collected at observatories help drive conservation efforts – Choy says monitoring is an essential step in protecting birds. According to a study by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, North America’s bird population has fallen by 2.9 billion breeding adults since 1970. Once common birds are no longer common, with devastating losses among birds in every biome from forests to grasslands.
An observatory was high on Choy’s wish list when she was recruited to McMaster’s biology department as an assistant professor in 2023. She just didn’t know where to put it or how to fund it. But then she visited the McMaster Forest Nature Preserve and applied for the university’s new Planetary Health Seed Grant.
The grant is supporting multi-disciplinary research in the nature preserve by Choy and colleagues Jessica van Horssen in the Faculty of Humanities and Adrianne Xavier with Indigenous Studies.
Nature@McMaster is scouting the location for the observatory’s bird station within the 51.5 hectare McMaster Forest Nature Preserve. There are also plans to add a MOTUS tower – a radio telemetry station that receives signals from nanotags attached to migratory animals like birds, bats and insects.
Banding together
Soon after starting at McMaster, Choy reached out to Ludkin, who began banding birds in the 1970s and started the Haldimand Bird Observatory 30 years ago with his late friend John Miles. In 2021, Ludkin moved the observatory to Gosnell’s Farm, located along the Grand River just 15 minutes outside Cayuga. He’s spending his retirement running the observatory with the help of volunteers of all ages.
Chief bird bander Rick Ludkin works under the watchful eye of a black lab.
While she had years of fieldwork experience banding seabirds in the Arctic, Choy reached out to Ludkin and asked if he could show her how to safely catch and band songbirds. “Rick readily invited me to ‘The Farm’ and mistook me for a student on my first visit. He’s such a great person who’s dedicated his life to helping birds.”
The Haldimand Bird Observatory, with its focus on research, training, participatory science and community outreach, is everything the McMaster observatory aspires to become, says Choy. It’s why she returned to “The Farm” with 13 undergraduate and graduate students who were eager for hands-on mentoring from Ludkin. “Banding birds isn’t something you can teach in a classroom.”
Assistant professor Emily Choy and 13 undergraduate and graduate students from her lab spent a day at the Haldimand Bird Observatory learning how to safely trap, identify, measure and band migratory song birds.
Ludkin and his volunteer team band thousands of songbirds a year – a process that involves waking before sunrise to open soft nylon nets located around the farm, checking those nets every half hour each morning, and taking the birds they catch to a station for measurements and banding before being released.
This fall, they caught, measured and banded 2,058 songbirds – topping the list were Song, Swamp and White-throated Sparrows. Along with banding, they do daily counts of all the birds seen and heard at the observatory.
Birds of a feather
For McMaster’s fledging observatory, Choy’s also drawing inspiration from the McGill Bird Observatory – a student-run project of the Migration Research Foundation, with a similar focus on migration monitoring, research and volunteer training. Previously at McGill as a W. Garfield Weston Postdoctoral Scholar and natural history instructor, Choy says their observatory was always full of enthusiastic students. “Everyone likes birds. And some of us love them.”
She expects the McMaster observatory will prove to be just as popular and not only with students. Community groups and individuals have already begun reaching out with offers to help run the observatory.
Along with generating data to support conservation efforts, the McMaster bird observatory will open up experiential learning opportunities that are currently limited to a select few students who join Choy in monitoring and banding sea birds in the Arctic.
Not only will the observatory be easier to get to – it’s only five kilometres southwest of the campus – songbirds will prove far easier to handle than Arctic seabirds.
A northern cardinal is the feistiest songbird that Choy’s banded here. “It clamped down pretty hard on one of my fingers with its beak, but that was peanuts compared to the bite of a murre or kittiwake.”