The wind that has caused us to close a couple nets early most of the last week continued today resulting in us only achieving 37 of our usual 72 net hours. Despite having only about half the usual net hours we managed to band 37 birds today, mostly owing to a quick start as activity plummeted around census time. Due to this, census was an abysmal 18 species affair. The highlight of census though was watching a Merlin eat a dragonfly.
Oh you can’t see the Merlin in that picture? How’s this?
Not bad for a $130 point-and-shoot camera eh?
Catching 37 new birds and 11 recaps on a day with such reduced net hours is pretty good, but what is even better is the birds we almost caught. Early in the day Avery watched a Sharp-shinned Hawk bounce out of one of out larger gauge nets and then later he found evidence that an adult male Northern Harrier had been in one of our nets briefly. This evidence consisted of one chest feather and a beautiful tail feather. Would have been great if we have managed to haul those two in in a single day.
In other news we are completely out of water at the field house which has led to certain compromises in hygiene… until now.
Seven years of post-secondary education has culminated in this very moment, when I hung a bag of slightly warmed lake water from a telescoping mop handle and propped it against the toilet. UVic and PSU eat your heart out that was money well spent. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and boy was a working shower becoming a necessity.
And finally to address my quiz from a couple days ago. Jaime came closest with her guess of hatch-year (young) Savannah Sparrow. The bird in question was actually an after hatch-year (adult) Savannah Sparrow. Starting at the most distal part of the wing and then working inwards, most passerines have nine primaries, then six secondaries, then three tertials. Adult birds sequentially replace their flight feathers (primaries and secondaries) starting from where the primaries and secondaries meet (the middle of the wing) and then working out in both directions. Due to this pattern, early on in their molt we often find adults with shorter than usual feathers near the center of their wing in good shape, and normal length feathers in bad shape towards the tip and base of the wing. Late in the molting process, when all old feathers have been dropped, we tend to see birds with brand new feathers throughout the wing, but the primaries towards the tip and the secondaries at the base of the wing have yet to finish growing. This is what we see here. The striking difference in length between the three tertials at the base of the wing and the adjacent inner secondaries tell us that this bird is still finishing up its molt, something that only adult birds do at this time of year in this sequential manner. No doubt a tough quiz, but I hope you followed along.
Species | Band | Recap |
Lincoln’s Sparrow | 12 | |
Yellow Warbler | 6 | 1 |
Wilson’s Warbler | 5 | |
Swainson’s Thrush | 3 | 2 |
Warbling Vireo | 3 | |
Song Sparrow | 2 | 2 |
Common Yellowthroat | 2 | 1 |
Hammond’s Flycatcher | 1 | |
Northern Waterthrush | 1 | |
MacGillivray’s Warbler | 1 | |
Yellow-rumped Warbler | 1 |
Birds banded | 37 |
Species banded | 11 |
Birds recaptured | 6 |
Species recaptured | 4 |
Species on census | 18 |
Species Total | 39 |
STANDARD TOTAL BANDED | 673 |
SEASON TOTAL BANDED | 755 |
~Chutter
How clever of you! Nice to be back in a shower, I’m sure. Do you keep the various feathers you find in the nets? I imagine you would have a pretty good collection by now – maybe it could be used for teaching new birders about species identification.