Bird observatory taking flight at McMaster Forest Nature Preserve with help from Planetary Health Seed Fund and a chief bird bander in Haldimand County

Emily Choy’s research group went on a fieldtrip to a farm this fall to learn how to handle what’s coming to the McMaster Forest Nature Preserve.

The Gosnell’s Farm is home to the Haldimand Bird Observatory. Choy and 13 students from her lab spent a day there 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.

Soon after starting at McMaster, Choy reached out to Ludkin. He began banding birds in the 1970s and started the observatory 30 years ago with his late friend John Miles. In 2021, Ludkin moved the observatory to the Gosnell’s Farm along the Grand River just 15 minutes outside Cayuga. He spends his retirement running the observatory with the help of volunteers of all ages. Ludkin relies on memberships, donations and grants to fund the observatory’s conservation and restoration activities.

While she had years of 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.”

While banding songbirds, Choy and Ludkin bonded over stories about seabirds. They had lots to talk about.

Choy studies the physiological response of climate change on seabirds – she does fieldwork in the Arctic every spring and sends students for extended, months-long stays to remote islands. From 2005 to 2011, Ludkin worked at seabird research camps on Devon Island, Southampton Island and Svalbard. Since 2012, he’s done contract work with the Canadian Wildlife Service counting seabirds on the open water. He’s travelled throughout the Northwest Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean.

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, screen-free mentoring by Ludkin. “Banding birds isn’t something you can teach in a classroom.”

Ludkin and his volunteer team have their hands full throughout the year. They spend April and May monitoring spring migration. From August to early November, they band thousands of songbirds. They’re up before sunrise to open soft nylon nets located all around the farm. The nets are checked every half hour and birds are taken to a station for measurements and banding and then released. The nets are closed around noon.

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. In the winter, Ludkin contributes data on Snow Buntings, Horned Larks, and Lapland Longspurs to the Canadian Snow Bunting Network which he started in 2010 with University of Windsor professor Oliver Love.

Ludkin makes time to train anyone who wants to apply for a government-issued scientific banding permit – applicants must prove they have previous experience with bird handling, identification and record-keeping. The same week that Choy’s research group paid a visit, Ludkin and his volunteers welcomed four groups from the University of Waterloo chapter of the Society of Ecological Restoration.

He also welcomes everyone who’s a bird enthusiast to visit the observatory and explore the property. Visitors often become members and volunteers and some even bring homemade baked goods for mid-morning snacks.

In launching McMaster’s observatory, Choy’s also drawing inspiration from the McGill Bird Observatory. It’s a student-run project of the Migration Research Foundation, with a similar focus on migration monitoring, research and volunteer training. While at McGill as a W. Garfield Weston Postdoctoral Scholar, Choy worked at the university as a natural history instructor.  Choy says the 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.

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 a location for the observatory’s bird station within the 51.5 hectare 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.

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. “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.”