Researchers who study owls will speak about their work tonight, Thursday, June 19 at 6:30 p.m. at Northwestern Michigan College.
Find more details about tonight's event in our community almanac.
They are looking for a way forward after Michigan Audubon paused funding for an owl banding program at Whitefish Point in the Upper Peninsula last fall.
Nova Mackentley and Chris Neri are with the recently-created nonprofit Friends of Whitefish Point. The organization wants to continue owl banding work independently of Michigan Audubon, plus create a network of nest boxes in the area and track owl migration.
“All these individual projects really contribute to the larger understanding of one of the harder-to-study species, because their breeding season is early. They're remote. They're nocturnal migrants. You can’t do visual counts,” said Chris Neri, who’s been doing owl research at Whitefish Point since 1999. “It's a lot of really targeted studies that give us the bigger, complete picture of owl biology — how their populations are doing.”
The team catches up to eight different species of owls at the station, including northern saw-whets, boreal owls and long-eared owls.
Mackentley, executive director of Friends of Whitefish Point, says they’ve raised enough money to cover about half of their research needs for this season.
“People do ask a lot like, ‘Well, what about habitat loss? Is climate change affecting them?’” Mackentley said. “The short answer is, ‘Yes, all those things will affect them,’ and to what degree is what we are putting together.”
Whitefish Point is a hotspot for birds, including owls.
“It's the largest spring migration of owls in North America — the largest and most diverse,” Neri said. “And it's really [because of] Lake Superior. They're moving north. A lot of them don't want to cross big, open water, so they just get funneled to us in the spring.”
Researchers caught over 600 juvenile northern saw-whet owls one summer — a staggering number, said Neri.
“We don't know where they're coming from. We don't know where they're going, but it's the only place where this has been documented,” he said.
Michigan Audubon’s owl banding program at Whitefish Point Bird Observatory remains paused for this season.
The organization says that’s because potential federal cuts could impact the nonprofit’s ability to run the program and it doesn’t want to duplicate work that has now been picked up by Friends of Whitefish Point.
Michigan Audubon’s other research at Whitefish Point, like seasonal bird counts, will remain.
