Week Four of Chimney Monitoring and Introducing our Summer Students
I’d like to introduce our two Assistants for the MCSI and Manitoba IBA programs this summer!
Nathan has graduated from Lakeland College with a diploma in wildlife and fisheries conservation and is working towards his B.Sc. in resource management at the University of Northern British Columbia. He is primarily working on grassland bird programming for the IBA, but you may occasionally see him out doing some chimney monitoring for us.
Alyssa has her B.Sc. from the University of Regina where she spent most summers doing a variety of fieldwork for graduate students. A lot of this work focused on researching bats, but included Western Painted Turtles and Common Nighthawks. She is currently working on her M.Sc. from the University of Winnipeg on bats, however she is also involved in the birding community through her volunteering at Oak Hammock Marsh and Last Mountain Lake Bird Observatories. Alyssa will be very involved with the MCSI program – so stop by and say hi, if you come across her monitoring a chimney!
In other news we’ve had some adventurous weather for all of our intrepid MCSI volunteers (and the Chimney Swifts themselves) to handle these past couple days.
Over in Dauphin, Ken and the Dauphin crew were battling some wicked weather near the end of his observation period “We had our doubts that we might not get to watch the chimneys tonight as there were lots of “pop-up” thunderstorms but they held off till the last swifts went down their respective chimneys… Now the wipers are going and lightning flashes are lighting up the west and southern skies so we’re heading home (10:15).” However, they were able to see swifts enter chimneys at the Watson Arts Centre 2018-14, Old Scott’s Hardware 2018-15 and the roosting chimney in Dauphin (MSCI site #600). This crazy night was then followed up by a frost warning yesterday evening, a bit of a roller coaster!
Frank and Jacquie were out at the Providence College in Otterburne this past Wednesday and saw quite the show of swifts. Frank mentioned “The CHSW were generally high and circling toward the river and forest to the SW with none of the usual overflights of the campus library/residence areas. So, 3 in the chimney nearest the Bell Tower (#550), 9 in the central chimney (#551), and 2 in the skinny chimney (#552) for a grand total of 14.”
Blair was watching chimneys on Tache in St Boniface. While he did not see any swifts in enter the chimney he was watching, he did see 20 swifts heading west over the building and the Red River… a new mystery to solve!
Elsewhere, Luc Blanchette monitored the chimney at the St Jean Baptiste Church and had one Chimney Swift entering the chimney for the night, and the same outcome happened at the St Francois Xavier Parish Church for Mike and Michele.
— Amanda Shave
