Summer nights in Canada can prove tricky for catching small, elusive wetland birds.
Rails are easier to catch in the dark, said Auriel Fournier, a Ph.D. candidate with the Arkansas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in the Department of Biological Sciences.
But nightfall only lasts a few hours in the summer months in Saskatchewan, where Fournier spent several weeks for her field research. Fournier spent night after night crouched in the soggy rail habitat as part of a large project trying to understand how the elusive wetland birds migrate.
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| Auriel Fourner with a captured rail in Saskatchewan |
“Rails are very elusive and live in dense vegetation, which makes observing them and capturing them difficult,” Auriel said. “By going out at night and using a speaker to broadcast their call, the birds can be drawn into small open areas in the wetland and caught with hand nets.”
Each captured bird received an aluminum band with a unique number, had some body measurements taken and had two feathers pulled, one from their wing and one from their tail. Each bird was released unharmed after being handled for only a few minutes.
Rails are one of the least studied birds in North America. In addition to her upcoming fall field work in Missouri to understand their habitat needs and timing during migration, Auriel is collecting feathers from sora, Virginia and yellow rails across their ranges to try to understand their connectivity between locations.
“Connectivity describes the breeding, migratory and wintering grounds
for a given species,” Auriel said. “It is not known where the birds
migrating through Missouri in the fall breed during the summer, but
through the use of stable hydrogen isotope ratios captured in the birds’
feathers we will soon have a glimpse at how big an area Missouri rails
come from.”The stable hydrogen ratios captured in the birds’ feathers can be traced back to their breeding grounds. By collecting feathers in Canada and then again during fall migration she hopes to be able to better understand if the rails migrating through Missouri come from the prairie provinces of Canada or farther east, perhaps around the Great Lakes region.
Fournier’s rail research is funded with a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her work this summer was partially funded by the Garden Club of America and she’s also received funding from the Arkansas Audubon Society Trust.
July 22, 2016
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