If you were driving along Crescent Road in Portage la Prairie this morning, you may have seen a group of people rounding up Canada geese into a makeshift pen.

It's an annual province-wide project by the Wildlife and Fisheries Branch, where they band the geese while they're re-growing flight feathers, and can't fly.

Provincial Game Bird Manager Frank Baldwin says it's to monitor harvest and survival rates.

Frank Baldwin as the operation concludes

"We caught about 240 birds, and I think 30 or 40 are re-captures, from previous years. The re-captures generate a lot of information, and of course, the recoveries that we get from hunters during the season throughout their migration provide most of the information to produce our estimates."

Baldwin says this year, they're doing more than banding.

"We're put on these red marker bands that have a geo-locator attached to them. It's a project that we're doing in cooperation with the Canadian Wildlife Service, looking at the timing of migration of different populations of Canada geese. The geo-locators log light levels. The light levels can be correlated with latitude and longitude, and when we re-capture those birds, and download the information, we can figure out the timing of migration, and departure dates."

There's be a similar round-up tomorrow at Delta Marsh.