Safely tagging owls can be a daunting prospect and presents many challenges. This webinar provides a unique opportunity to hear from three field experts, who will present their respective techniques, as well as useful tips & tricks for the species they have worked with. These include Barred owls, Northern Saw-whet owls and Burrowing owls! The presentations will be followed by a Q&A session. 

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Speakers

• Geoff Holroyd

Dr. Geoff Holroyd’s interest in birds developed as a teenager when he was an active volunteer starting in 1961 and later as chairman of the Long Point Bird Observatory.  He earned his MSc and PhD from the University of Toronto for his studies of the foraging strategies and diet of swallows. He retired in 2012 after 36 years with the Canadian Wildlife Service including studies of peregrine falcons and burrowing owls, and chairing their national recovery teams. Among other things he has tracked the results of the Edmonton Christmas Bird Count for 40 years. He is now chair of the Beaverhill Bird Observatory. He coauthored the new book ‘Wildlife of the North’ in August 2023. His latest research project is to track Northern Saw-whet Owls from BBO to around North America using the MOTUS wildlife tracking system.

• Colleen Wisinski

Colleen Wisinski is the Conservation Program Manager for the Burrowing Owl Recovery Program at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, where she has worked for the past 14 years. Colleen is responsible for overseeing the field team, managing and analyzing data, and working  with colleagues to make recommendations about management of the species to local land and wildlife managers. As part of this work, she has placed backpack transmitters on ~100 burrowing owls. Colleen earned her bachelor’s degree in Biology and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, and her master’s degree in Fish and Wildlife Management from Montana State University in Bozeman, where she examined survival and habitat use of greater sage-grouse in southwestern Montana (this included attaching necklace-style transmitters to adults). Colleen has also worked as a wildlife rehabilitator where she trained several raptors for educational purposes, and as a whooping crane tracker where she used radio and satellite telemetry to monitor a reintroduced population of cranes.

• Vitek Jirinec

Vitek Jirinec is a research scientist at the Integral Ecology Research Center in northern California. Most of his work leverages data from animal-borne tags—he got his BS from Humboldt State University (2010) in part for radio-tracking warblers in Jamaica, his MS from College of William & Mary (2015) for a thesis based on VHF tags on thrushes in Virginia, and his PhD from Louisiana State University (2021) where he used GPS and other biologgers on understory birds in Amazonia. The latter work made him recognize the value of field-adjustable tag harnesses, which he described in this publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jofo.12353 For the past seven years, Vitek studied space use and energy expenditure of Barred Owls in Louisiana https://fb.watch/qX_ofVFl3R/ and northern California using tags held with elastic wing (backpack) harnesses designed to stay on birds for several months. His presentation will focus on tips and tricks of this approach.