
The museum prepares others as taxidermy mounts in the galleries for public education on wildlife conservation. “Rarer species are kept as museum specimens,” said Peck, for research on the variation of biodiversity. Mark Peck is ornithology technician at the ROM and gatekeeper of the FLAP birds. The white-throated sparrow is a common species, he said, that breeds during the summer throughout most of Canada and migrates to wintering grounds primarily in the southern and eastern United States. Article content THE CANADIAN PRESS/Victor Ferreira This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. To coincide with the spring migration, thousands of the dead birds that are collected by the approximately 100 FLAP volunteers are displayed at the Royal Ontario Museum. This public awareness event draws attention to the perils that confront birds in urban settings and also solutions to minimize the impacts, such as turning off office lights at night that can confuse and attract migrating birds.
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She noted that it was a juvenile before wrapping a tag around the leg with the number 132677, arranging the body into a streamlined form as her instruction manual recommends for possible research use and “double-bagging it in my freezer below the ice tray.” Long distance migration is hard work With the characteristic black and white markings on its head, “I knew immediately that it was a white-throated sparrow,” she said.

The white-throated sparrow is at the top of the hit list and accounts for 15% of the collisions.ĭuring her morning patrol on October 5, FLAP volunteer Melissa McDonald found a dead bird on King Street West. In the past two decades, about 56,000 bird-building accidents have been recorded in the city involving 164 species of birds.

