Vernon teacher using tech to track birds in Kal Lake park

A teacher in Vernon is tracking the numbers and species of birds found in the Kalamalka Lake Provincial Park using a device called BirdWeather.

Robert Buchanan’s backyard is metres away from the park where numerous species of birds live or migrate through.

“It’s amazing, it blows my mind,” he said. “There’s lots of activity and lately there was a northern pygmy owl and a saw-whet owl.”

The device is the size of a baseball and can detect and count birds through their vocalizations, then identifies the species. The information is available on a live feed.

Buchanan has had BirdWeather set up for a couple of months.

“The hope is that the community can use it to see what’s going on around them, there are a lot of people interested in birds in the area,” he said. “It’s a way to visualize the soundscape, and I hope people use it and are able to learn more our local ecology.”

Buchanan is a facilitator of the Awaken Education program at Vernon School District 22. It’s a program of choice for students grades 8 to 12 who go into the community to do hands-on environmental restoration work and environmental monitoring activities.

There are birders in Buchanan’s class who enjoy checking into the live BirdWeather.

“We have another BirdWeather tool students can take with them on walks and plug it in after to learn what birds were around them, so that’s kind of cool,” Buchanan said.

BirdWeather is one of the latest additions to a website called OE-Map that Buchanan and his fellow teachers run, which is used to map outdoor education opportunities in the area to help teachers, students and knowledgeable people feel more connected to one another and the environment.

“BirdWeather has been a really fun addition to the website because it let’s everyone explore real-time detections and discover the soundscape of the valley in a new way,” he said.

Go here to see numbers and species of birds detected live in Kalamalka Lake Provincial Park.