Spring Encounters
Every banding season, we capture a number of owls that are already banded. These captures are always very exciting for us, it’s like a little feather-wrapped gift, and we love anticipating whether it is a bird we banded in a previous year, or from another part of the country! This spring, we had 45 encounters: 41 saw-whets (NSWO), three long-eareds (LEOW) and one barred (BAOW). Of those, 26 were owls originally banded at another banding station and the remaining 19 were recaptures of our own owls from previous years. Interestingly, the percentage of encounters per total captures year to year does not vary much despite the large variation in capture numbers. This year our percentage was 5%, which is normal.
2025 Spring Owl Foreign Encounters- 26 total. The number inside the blue dot indicates the number of owls we captured from that banding station.
We received information from the USGS Bird Banding Lab on all 26 foreign encounters (one LEOW and the rest NSWO). As expected, the only banding station with seven encounters was Mackinac Straits, most likely due to their proximity to Whitefish Point. However, we had three encounters from the Keewenaw Peninsula, two NSWO and one LEOW. All three were birds banded the previous spring (2024) in Copper Harbor. This is a new project run by Tim Baerwald in the Keeweenaw, so we are really interested to see what kind of movement happens over there in spring. There were two NSWO each from Stevens Point WI, Muskegon MI and St. Williams ON. Then it was all one NSWO each from the following locations: Duluth MN, Danville IL, Babcock WI, Timiskaming ON, Long Point ON, Windsor ON, Tofte MN, Amherst WI, Rochester MN, and Marine on St. Croix MN. Of the 26 foreign encounters, 11 were banded in spring 2024, five in fall 2023, five in fall 2022, three in spring 2024 and two in fall 2021.
This Long-eared Owl was originally banded by us in 2021 and recaptured this spring as at least a seven year old bird.
This season our 19 recaptures included 16 saw-whets (NSWO), two long-eareds (LEOW) and one barred (BAOW). The 16 NSWO included eight from spring 2024, five from summer 2024, two from spring 2023 and one from spring 2022. One saw-whet was extremely punctual and was recaptured on the same date as it was originally banded two years ago (5/27). We recaptured two LEOW this spring, one from last spring and one from Spring 2021. The Long-eared from 2021 is now at least seven years old! We recaptured just one Barred Owl this spring, but it was an interesting one. This bird was originally banded in Spring 2022, then was recaptured in Spring 2023 and now again this spring. Whitefish Point is clearly part of it’s migration route.
Barred Owl recaptured in 2023 and in 2025. We noted that this bird was also in very good health.
NATURE NOTES:
This gorgeous leucistic White-rumped Sandpiper was at the Point yesterday. A big thanks to Kai Sterk, Alexander DeBear and Ava Kornfeld for reporting it. For those not familiar with the term, leucistic means that it is lacking some of pigments normally found in this species, but still has too many to be called albino.
This week on the moth lighthouse setup we had a Cecropia moth. These beautiful large silk moths are rare up in our part of the woods. This is only the second one that we’ve personally had at Whitefish Point.
The owl banding visitation is about to begin again! You can sign up for Friday or Saturday all through July and most of August to visit the owl banding and learn all about owls and why they are moving past Whitefish Point during the summer. This is a great night-time activity to do with friends!
