It’s 4:30 a.m. and a group of dedicated bird watchers and biologists have turned the ‘early bird gets the worm’ notion on its head. This time, the target isn’t the worm, but the birds themselves.

Over the past several weeks and until some time in mid to late August, Jasper National Park biologists have been setting up bird catching nets nearly ten feet high and almost twenty feet long at a location near Pyramid Lake. In conjunction with 500 other sites around North America, they’re catching land and song birds (robins, flycatchers, warblers, chickadees, hummingbirds and more) to collect data to help give a more detailed picture about the survival rates of birds on the continent. The name of the study is the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) study and it is being lead by the Institute for Bird Populations, which is based out of Point Reyes, California.

“We’re seeing declines in many species all across North America,” said Brenda Shepherd, a senior organizer and data collector at the bird watching site. Shepherd, who is also a biologist for Jasper National Park, said there was one main goal to collecting data about the birds: conservation. 

“Because we’re seeing these declines, we need to better understand where the birds survival rates are higher, where they seem to be breeding more.” 

By collecting data (the bird’s species, weight, wing span, age, sex and more) from a variety of different ecosystems and then comparing that to records from different sites, the study will hopefully deduce which ecosystems the birds survive and breed in best. This information can then hopefully be used to set public policy to protect specific types of land that birds thrive in.

The location northwest of Jasper, on several hectares of land, is one such thriving location, said Shepherd. Located about a kilometre due west of Pyramid Lake, birds seem to love the catching spot. Shepherd said that’s because the area offers a wide variety of habitats. There’s swampy grasslands, relatively new alder trees, older coniferous forest and even a sandy, dried out pond. The diversity in habitats and the nearby water sources means that insects thrive in the area and when the food is good, the birds will stay.

The station typically catches around 30 to 35 different species of song birds, most of them not much bigger than a child’s hand. Most of the birds are in Jasper for the spring and summer breeding season and once the autumn rolls around, many will be migrating south to places as far away as Panama and Ecuador.

Shepherd said the ten nets the group sets up at the site will probably bring in about 35 to 40 birds over the course of a normal catching morning. Some mornings, they’ve caught closer to 50. The nets are fully set up by about 6 a.m. most mornings and catch birds until noon. The bird catchers will go through this operation around six times this year for the study. 2010 is also the seventh year that Shepherd has been collecting data near Jasper for the MAPS study.

On a hot and sunny morning on July 8, the bird collecting is going well. Children and people approaching their retirement years mill about the bird catching site, eager to check the nets. Every ten minutes, they make the rounds and check the meshy confines to see if any birds have been caught.

When a bird is caught in the net, it can be a delicate extraction operation. The birds tend to struggle as they are manhandled and sometimes the netting is wrapped around their heads and wings. It takes a soft touch and a mind that understands knots to free the birds. Once the bird is out of the web, they are put into tiny, draw stringed pillow cases and brought back to Shepherd for analysis. While she handles one bird, the rest in the tiny pillow cases are clothes-pinned to a line, waiting for their appointment with the bird biologist.

With delicate hands, Shepherd puts the birds through the rigours. She spreads wings to uncover the condition of feathers which will help to tell her how old the bird is. She blows on the birds abdomens to ruffle their feathers up so she can see down to the bird’s skin and check its sex.

A small metal band with a nine digit number is also clamped around the birds’ leg. Sometimes, a bird that has already been clamped will return back to the station. This is a valuable and rare find for the measuring station. Perhaps more than any other indicator, it reveals how well the birds are surviving.

 The bird is then loaded face first into a plastic tube on top of a digital scale to take its weight. The tube is then picked up and taken out into the open and as soon as the bottom cap of the tube is opened, the bird is free. Shepherd will sometimes let kids open up the tube so the birds can fly away.

Results are still being tabulated by Shepherd and the California Institute for Bird Populations, she isn’t in a position to draw firm conclusions about how birds are doing in Jasper. Still, she said that like much of North America, bird populations in general are dropping here. As an example, she points to the Olive-sided Fly Catcher, which can be found in the summer all around Canada and since 2007 has been on the threatened species list for the entire country. Even the relatively abundant Rufous Hummingbird, a bird which migrates to Mexico in the winter and can only be found on the west side of Canada, has seen population decreases in recent years, said Shepherd.

There is one main reason birds are having a harder time in North America

“Habitat change. That is the major driver,” said Shepherd.

That can mean everything from human incursions into land that birds live on to the complete destruction of that land. Whether it’s more hikers, quadders, and backpackers or the construction of subdivisions, birds are finding it harder to get away from people.

That’s why Shepherd said it’s so important to figure out what types of land are the most abundant supporters of bird life. If bird land is disappearing, than holding onto the most vital land becomes much more important.