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Wildlife students discover migrant owl during local banding project
Most Pennsylvania residents wouldn’t recognize a Saw-whet owl unless
they saw it on one of the Commonwealth’s popular Wildlife Conservation Fund
license plates. That’s because the little owls are nocturnal. They hide in
the daytime and aren’t seen all that often at night.
But students in the Penn State DuBois associate
degree program in wildlife technology are well acquainted with the owls
because of their annual fall banding project. Faculty, students, and
volunteers are in their fourth year of the effort, designed to capture,
evaluate and band the birds so that wildlife scientists can learn more about
them.
“Saw-whet owls are a migratory bird,” explains Keely
Roen, instructor in wildlife technology. “But there is very little data
collected so far on their travel habits.”
Roen says students in the campus wildlife technology
courses have been spending fall evenings for the past four years at a site
near Brockway using a calling device and nets to capture Saw-whet owls at
night, evaluate them, band them, and return them to the wild. She says data
including length, weight, and condition is recorded for each owl.
The students and their mentor faculty members have
sometimes caught owls that they had been banded before, but recently their
interest was piqued by a new development. They had captured an owl that had
been banded elsewhere.
“We were really very excited about that capture,”
explains Roen. “It gave us the opportunity to record the band numbers and
inquire about the previous capture.”
Officials at the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory were
able to fill in some of the details. The federal managers reported that the
owl had been captured and banded more than a year earlier in Maine.
“This is the sort of thing we had hoped to discover,”
says Joe Hummer, another instructor in wildlife who has been active with the
banding project. “This is a great example of how this project can help to
gather relevant data about the species, and how our students have the chance
to take part in cutting-edge work in the field.”
Penn State DuBois has been the home of the associate
degree program in wildlife technology for nearly three decades. It is the
only Penn State location that offers the degree. Graduates are prepared for
hands-on jobs in wildlife management often working for government agencies
and sometimes for private industry. |
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