University of Montana Bird Ecology Lab

University of Montana Bird Ecology Lab The UM Bird Ecology Lab offers a "bird's-eye-view" of Montana's avian species through applied resear

The UM Bird Ecology Lab contributes to knowledge of avian ecology through a combination of original research, long-term and ecological effects monitoring, education, and community engagement. Our committed and passionate scientists actively seek out and use the best available protocols, field techniques and data analysis methods to assess ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.

✨ We had two very exciting visitors to the banding station this week! ✨ Dr. Leslie Rissler, seen here releasing a Swains...
09/03/2026

✨ We had two very exciting visitors to the banding station this week! ✨

Dr. Leslie Rissler, seen here releasing a Swainson’s Thrush, joined us in the field on Monday to learn about our research projects and ongoing fall migration monitoring at MPG Ranch ! Dr. Rissler is the Dean of the newly formed University of Montana College of Science, which comprises 8 science and mathematics departments. Her impressive research career includes studying ecological niches and phylogeography of herpetofauna, serving in various executive leadership roles at the National Science Foundation, bringing awareness to gender differences in the STEM fields, annnd she has a background in bird ecology 😁 🐦 😁, having conducted her M.S. work studying habitat structure of rare birds of prey: Northern Goshawk and Spotted Owl. UMBEL is proud to host and meet Dr. Rissler who will help oversee work being done at our R1 institution. We are excited about future intersections with this new College of Science!

The other esteemed guest who visited our nets was this (slide 2&3) tiny hatch-year male Sharp-shinned Hawk, still sporting his juvenile plumage and pale eyes. It was a lovely way to start the week! 😊

University of Montana

🍁 Migration is happening! Last week, we started our 16th year of Fall Migration Banding on the MPG Ranch floodplain! 🍁 🐦...
08/26/2026

🍁 Migration is happening! Last week, we started our 16th year of Fall Migration Banding on the MPG Ranch floodplain! 🍁

🐦 This time of year is always exciting for birds. We get to see a variety of species that may not have bred on the floodplain moving through and using the habitat to molt and fatten up! With so many young-of-the-year on the landscape we also ge to see a lot of fresh juvenile plumage, molt limits and "molt limits in progress"!

Here are some recent highlights!

Photo 1: a beautiful Hatch Year Red-eyed Vireo, note that the eye color has yet to turn very red!

Photo 2: Hatch Year Willow Flycatcher, in it's crispy, buffy edged juvenile plumage. Many of our flycatchers don't typically molt until reaching the wintering grounds

Photo 3: Hatch Year Chipping Sparrow undergoing it's Preformative Molt but still with a lot of juvenile body plumage

Photo 4: Hatch Year Western Wood-Pewee, also sporting buffy edged juvenile wing coverts

Photo 5: a subtle A1 molt limit on a Hatch Year Orange-Crowned Warbler which recently finished it's partial Preformative Molt

Photo 6: another Hatch Year Orange-Crowned Warbler in the process of a partial Preformative Molt

We recently recaptured two Swainson's Thrushes at MPG Ranch that we had tagged with Motus transmitters back in 2024!🌎 Sw...
08/21/2026

We recently recaptured two Swainson's Thrushes at MPG Ranch that we had tagged with Motus transmitters back in 2024!

🌎 Swainson’s Thrushes don’t seem to breed at our MPG banding station, but show up in this riparian habitat in late summer. Taking advantage of the abundance of food and thick cover to fuel for migration and stay safe during their big annual molt. It never ceases to amaze us how these ~30 gram travelers can navigate the hemisphere year after year to complete their life cycle! 🌎

First slide: We’d captured this bird twice before at this station, 9/3/24 when we tagged it and then again 8/13/25 when we determined that the tag was still functioning and left it deployed. Between those two captures, this bird had – at a minimum – flown all the way to Costa Rica and back! Some interesting tidbits from a quick look at the data:

🧭 It took this bird about a month to get from MT to Costa Rica, this epic journey included 500-mile nonstop flights over open water of the gulf.

🧭 The following spring, it was first detected in the US in coastal Texas and made it back to the Bitterroot Valley in 19 days from there.

🧭 All 3 captures of this bird were in two nets that are within 20 meters of each other! Site fidelity (or site faithfulness) is more typically related to breeding and wintering sites, but these birds appear to have high site fidelity for molting grounds 🤔

We checked the Motus data during this capture (8/4/26), determined that the nanotag was no longer functioning and removed it to release the bird unburdened 🫡

Second slide: We first captured this bird around the same time of year way back in 2021 when it was identified as a hatch-year! Upon recapture in 2024, we fitted it with a Motus tag and tracked it all the way down to at least central Colombia during that fall migration! 😲

Motus towers tracked its return to MT via the gulf coast the following summer. We got one more migration track in fall of '25, with the last detection, Oct. 10th, near Veragua Rainforest, Costa Rica.

During this year's encounter, we were able to liberate this now 5-year-old bird of its harness! 🫡

Our Bird's-Eye View Education Program just finished our last sessions of summer banding for the MAPS (Monitoring Avian P...
08/13/2026

Our Bird's-Eye View Education Program just finished our last sessions of summer banding for the MAPS (Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship) season! 🥳 To celebrate, here are some particularly adorable "products" (babies) from at and around our banding stations 🥺

🐦 Thanks to everyone who came out to visit us and learn about birds, healthy riparian ecosystems, and the effects of historic mining on the Clark Fork watershed!!! 🐦

1) Golden-crowned Kinglet
2) Yellow-headed Blackbird
3) Bobolink
4) Northern Rough-winged Swallow
5) Northern House Wren
6) Tree Swallow
7) Orange-crowned Warbler
8) Bank Swallow
9) Mountain Chickadee
10) Barn Swallow
11) Savannah Sparrow
12) Red-winged Blackbird
13) Song Sparrow
14) Cassin's Vireo
15) Osprey nest with chick at our Rock Creek site
16) Wilson's Snipe carefully moved off trail!

*All birds handled by trained professionals under appropriate permits*

Institute for Bird Populations Five Valleys Land Trust MPG Ranch

What’s the buzz on our Grassland Bird Project?..….other than the Grasshopper Sparrows singing of course *Ba-dum-tss! 🥁.W...
07/22/2026

What’s the buzz on our Grassland Bird Project?..….other than the Grasshopper Sparrows singing of course *Ba-dum-tss! 🥁.

We have been hard at work target netting and deploying tracking tags on another 50 grassland sparrows. This is the second consecutive year we have put out tags on adult Grasshopper Sparrows and adult Vesper Sparrows. These tiny, battery powered tags (Lotek ) will add to our understanding of migratory routes and timing of grassland species nesting on MPG Ranch (MPG Ranch ). Additionally, this year we are collecting feather samples from these birds for the Bird Genoscape Project (BGP) project to help us better understand migratory connectivity in this assemblage.

🌾 🐦 🌾 🗺️
Grassland species are among the most imperiled groups of birds in North America, and understanding their migratory routes and habitat needs throughout their full annual cycle is imperative for conservation. Stay tuned for updates (and fun maps) when our birds start to move!

*All birds handled by trained professionals under appropriate permits*

Photo 1: an adult Grasshopper Sparrow fitted with a tracking tag and ready for release.
Photo 2: an adult Vesper Sparrow with a tracking tag.
Photo 3: Vesper Sparrow showing where the tiny tracking tag sits on the back.
Photo 4: Vesper Sparrow release!

We really enjoyed all your responses 😆 but here is what that neckwear is actually about AND what it has to do with birds...
07/16/2026

We really enjoyed all your responses 😆 but here is what that neckwear is actually about AND what it has to do with birds! 🐦🐄 🐮 🌾

In southwest Montana you may see cattle wearing a new accessory. Ranchers are implementing virtual fencing–an innovative technology that uses GPS-equipped collars to manage cattle and reduce the need for physical fences. Virtual fencing is controlled from a smartphone app 📱, giving ranchers and land managers unprecedented flexibility and precision in where and when cattle are grazed. 

UMBEL is collaborating with The Nature Conservancy (The Nature Conservancy in MT ) and the Southwest Montana Sagebrush Partnership to learn how bird communities respond to these changes in grazing management. Many songbirds that occur across the diverse rangelands of North America are declining, including species that depend on sagebrush, grassland, and riparian ecosystems. Rangeland management practices can affect breeding songbirds by altering the availability of preferred nesting substrates, refugia from predators, and foraging success. By pairing bird surveys with data from collared cattle, we can identify grazing practices that optimize avian conservation. 🐄 🐦 🐮 🌾

During bird surveys this summer, UMBEL biologists encountered Sage Thrashers, Greater Sage-Grouse, Ferruginous Hawks, and an impressive variety of sparrows—including Brewer’s, Vesper, Song, Grasshopper, White-crowned, and Savannah Sparrows. 

Learn more about virtual fencing and The Nature Conservancy partnerships with ranches in southwest Montana in this video (link also in bio): https://nature.ly/4uXMFKp

Learn more about the Southwest Montana Sagebrush Partnership (link also in bio): https://nature.ly/4uXMte9

Media by: Tricia Rodriguez
Slide 1: collared cattle on the open range
Slide 2: hatch day at a Brewer's Sparrow nest
Slide 3: a typical survey scene in Montana, can you spot the surveyor?
Slide 4: Vesper Sparrow with food for the nest!
Slide 5: Vesper Sparrow nest!
Slide 6: a surveyor crossing "not-so-flexible" fencing
Slide 7: Elephant's Head Lousewort blooming on the open plain 💜

07/10/2026

For please join us in showing some love and appreciation to our amazing field crew! Each year, UMBEL seeks out the best of the best to tackle the immense amount of field work we’ve lined up. This year, our three seasonals have mainly spread their time between MAPS (Institute for Bird Populations) banding with our Bird’s-Eye View Education Program and Tree Swallow nest box monitoring/sampling for our ecotoxicology work.

From us and the birds, thank you guys for all your hard work and dedication! ❤️ 🐦 ❤️

Slide 1: Grace!
Favorite bird: American Dipper!
This is Grace’s 4th season with UMBEL! Grace is grateful to have lived and worked in Montana for ~10 years, first working in conservation through trail work, Aquatic Invasive Species management, and environmental education around beaver habitat before finding her way into the bird world! She brings with her a wealth of experience and has travelled throughout the west to work on field ornithology projects, acquiring a whole range of field skills like: nest searching, point counting, migration banding, and motus tagging. Most recently, she was working on a wintering grassland bird motus tagging project in the SW with Bird Conservancy of Rockies

Slide 2: Laura!
Favorite bird: White-tailed Tropicbird!
Originally from the Netherlands 🇳🇱, Laura grew up in Kansas and started doing wildlife field work and banding birds there during her undergrad. Laura then spent the last 1.5 years island hopping in Hawai‘i 🏝️🐦 🏝️ working on three different bird research projects including Hawaiian honeycreepers (hawaii_vine_project), ducks, and avian frugivore plant interactions.

Slide 3: Kara!
Favorite bird: her beloved Saltmarsh Sparrows!
Kara graduated with a degree in wildlife and conservation biology from the University of New Hampshire where she fell in love with birds after taking an ornithology class! She previously worked two migration bird banding seasons in the eastern US, as well as three seasons with SHARP but this is her first MAPS season and first time exploring out west! 🌲🥾 🏔️ 🌲

Let's have a Chat 😉 Yellow-breasted Chats have been increasing in the last few years at our MPG Ranch MAPS banding stati...
07/03/2026

Let's have a Chat 😉

Yellow-breasted Chats have been increasing in the last few years at our MPG Ranch MAPS banding station. Likely, in part, due to the surrounding thickets of Snowberry reaching an attractive height for nesting 🪹. Chats like a dense understory, with nice open canopies. YBCH have long been considered taxonomic oddities, they were previously lumped in with the new world warblers until DNA analysis supported elevating them to their own family in 2017, Icteriidae.

We caught this stunning After Second Year male earlier this month and found he was already banded! Looking back at the data, we can see that he was first captured and banded June 2025 in a neighboring net, then determined to be in his Second Year of life. So now this bird is in its third year (something we wouldn't be able to tell without previous capture data) and returning to its same territory for the second time to breed 😁

Most songbirds share this high "site fidelity", returning to the same breeding territories year after year to raise their nests. Hope to see ya next year little guy 🫡


Our Tree Swallows are hard at work raising their wriggling masses of babies! Across our nest box network, almost all nes...
06/24/2026

Our Tree Swallows are hard at work raising their wriggling masses of babies! Across our nest box network, almost all nests now have nestlings, which means swallows are especially busy feeding babies and our field crew is especially busy monitoring and sampling! Compared to previous years, nesting phenology (timing) seems to be about a week ahead, likely due to our mild winter and early spring here in western MT.

Both adults attend the nestlings and frequently bring in wads of flying adult aquatic insects (mayflies, caddisflies, etc.)... they are essentially a feathered trout! 🐟 🪶 🐦

Video 1: female Tree Swallow watching the world go by from her nest hole
Video 2: food delivery 🚚!
Video 3: exiting to look for more food
Video 4: a pair checking that the coast is clear before delivering the food 🦟
Video 5: male Tree Swallow with food for the best
Photo 6: handsome male Tree Swallow

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