Unmasking the Long-distance Migration of Flammulated Owls

By | Partners, Science | No Comments

By my students’ calculations, we had spent over 50 hours trying to capture this particular Flammulated Owl, dating back two summers. Make no mistake—there have been many challenging owls to capture over the course of this 40-year demographic study, but this owl had drawn extra attention from the nine students working with me that summer, with its Houdini-esque tactics for evading capture at a nest cavity high in a quaking aspen.

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Approaching Conservation with Both Western and Indigenous Science

By | Land Stewardship, Stewardship | No Comments

From a young age, I felt a disconnect between our culture and nature. I was always curious about the natural world and wondered why anyone would want to study anything else. My father’s idealist view and respect for Indigenous people specifically inspired me. I longed to live more connected to the land, like the Indigenous people whose ways of life I had come to admire.

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Building Resiliency from the Ground Up

By | Stewardship | No Comments

Another summer in the Northern Great Plains has come and gone, now fleeting as quickly as it arrived. With it, the many birds who travel thousands of miles to call these grasslands home during the breeding season have begun to make the long journey back to their wintering grounds. For the many ranchers and farmers of eastern Montana, the work is not done.

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Christmas Bird Count at Barr Lake

By | Education | No Comments

Once a year each winter, dozens of volunteers congregate at Barr Lake State Park to dedicate their day to a singular purpose: tally every bird of every species seen within a 15-mile diameter circle centered on Barr Lake. This tradition has been taking place every year since 1980 at Barr Lake, but the origins of the Christmas Bird Count (CBC) go back much further.

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Rare Bird Alert! A Story of the Yellow Rail Detection in Colorado

By | IMBCR, Monitoring Programs, Uncategorized | No Comments

Being a birder means a lot of different things to many different people. Some birders go out every week to count and list as many species as they can find, while others have a yard list of the birds they identify from their window. Read below for a guest blog from Eric DeFonso, a Bird Conservancy seasonal field crew leader for our Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions (IMBCR) program. Eric shows how sometimes, birding by sight is not always feasible or possible.

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A Black Swift Story: Richard Levad and Zapata Falls

By | Bird-friendly Living, Education | No Comments

The Bird Conservancy of the Rockies’ social media posting on August 31 grabbed my attention. Featuring a close up of a Black Swift in hand, the accompanying post announced that the Black Swift Research Team had recently caught three Black Swifts, all of which had been banded 17 years ago in 2005 as adults, breaking the longevity record of oldest known for the species. My heart nearly stopped.

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