Sometimes the best way to assess a fish population is to become a fish…. or at least pretend to be one. Snorkel surveys are a sampling method sometimes utilized by fisheries biologists to enable them to peer into the underwater hidey holes which aquatic organisms call home. These surveys allow biologists to quantify the distribution, abundance, and composition of fish in an area, assess how they might be utilizing habitat, and understand more about their behavior. While other fisheries sampling methods such as electrofishing or trapping can be used, snorkel surveys require no fish handling and very little added stress to fish, making them a relatively low-impact alternative to more invasive sampling methods. While the other sampling methods such as electrofishing certainly play a role in the biologist’s toolbox, often snorkel surveys can be used to answer questions that may not be feasible to answer using other methods. Additionally, snorkel surveys have the added benefit of being very cost effective to perform over a large area of habitat.

Although it may be easy to pick out the differences between these species when you’re comparing them on a page, it is much more difficult to accurately identify these birds in the field. The birds above are all swallows. From the family Hirundinidae, swallows are typically insectivorous and agile flyers (Sibley 2016, 305). There are six swallow species you can find throughout Alberta: Bank Swallows, Tree Swallows, Cliff Swallows, Barn Swallows, Northern Rough-Winged Swallows, and Violet-green Swallows (Sibley 2016, 306-309). The most common swallows, Bank, Tree, Cliff, and Barn Swallows, typically breed in North America and winter as far south as Argentina in the Cliff Swallow’s case (Sibley 2016, 306-309: Cornell University, 2024a). Here are some common ID tips you can use in the springtime, when these frequent flyers come around!

We’re back with yet another cheesy Christmas letter from the AJM family! Against popular demand, we’ve unleashed another installment of our annual letter because apparently, we just can’t stop ourselves from talking about, well, ourselves. We promise that Chat GPT only wrote a small portion and it’s quite easy to tell which parts (hint: the jokes that aren't funny).