This month’s blog is all about the “Birds” pillar of FCEA’s work! We have a lot to celebrate in this area. Since the founding of the organization in 2020, we have wanted to resume the bird banding that took place on the property for many years, through collaboration between the San Vito Bird Club, the Connecticut Audubon Society, and the former Costa Rica Bird Observatory.
Our bird banding dreams finally came true last week!
FCEA has officially joined the Monitoring Overwinter Survival Program (the acronym in Spanish is “MoSI,” which stands for Monitoreo de Sobrevivencia Invernal). Run by the Institute for Bird Populations (IBP), MoSI involves an international network of collaborators who conduct banding efforts throughout Central and South America. Through the data we collected over the course of our first five-day MoSI “pulse” (and we will run three pulses per year) with the huge help of our partner organization, Osa Birds, as well as excellent training by the very knowledgeable NABC certified bander and ornithologist Holly Garrod, we can acquire new information about the birds on our property and in our region. (For example, several of the birds we caught were recaptures from the SVBC-CAS-CRBO bird banding days, meaning they are over six years old!)
Overlapping with our first MoSI pulse was another exciting project: collaboration with Drs. Kira Delmore and Hannah Justen of Texas A&M University on their research looking at the hybridization and migration ecology of Swainson’s Thrushes using the Motus Wildlife Tracking System (a global network run by Birds Canada). Remember that Finca Cántaros installed the second Motus Station in all of Costa Rica, and when we started detecting many Swainson’s Thrushes that were part of Dr. Delmore’s “BC Interior Thrushes” project back in 2021, I reached out to let her know about our environmental education centre here in San Vito. I opened the door to collaboration, to which Dr. Delmore responded with interest, and since then we have worked together on both an environmental education outreach project last April, and now this Motus tagging and blood extraction work.
