Well, this is it. The moment you avid readers were praying would never arrive yet in your hearts knew was creeping up, inevitable as that scrape of metal on cardboardy substance as the spoon comes away empty and you realize that, alas…there really IS no more Ice cream left in the tub.
Same situation here really. It would be great to keep going but we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel, migration has slowed to a mere trickle….You know, it was a a barrel of laughs a week ago… like shooting fish in a barrel and we were happy as a barrel of monkeys…laughing…shooting fish, whatever. But now, as the great poet and song-writer Jim Morrison so lyrically put it; this is the end.
So, with one last census on the cards I arrived at the station this morning to find…hey, where’d the water go??? For the last 4 days it had been up to net 1 and suddenly it was gone. From by the banding lab I could just make out some water starting by net 13 (the second net….). Amazingly, I could do a complete net round (with rubber boots)! I guess that the river had dropped below that critical point where it was flooding into the fields and across into those nets that are not along the river bank (our nets are in an “L” shape. There are 6 nets between the banding lab and the river then to the right, following the river are another 5 nets, there is also one net just the other side of the river). Anyways, assuming that the situation would not have changed, I had arrived at the station at census time, so I did not end up having the time to do any actual banding.
Census was, as expected, slow. Despite the reduced size of the “lake” in the field, the number of waterfowl had double. 48 Mallard, 16 Green-winged Teal, 14 Northern Pintail and 3 American Wigeon. A Ring-necked Duck flew over low, but thought “too shallow for diving” and kept going. The Northern Pygmy-owl was calling again from the other side of the lake. I had thought I heard him the other day but over the roar of the river, I wasn’t sure. About halfway through census an unfamiliar call caught my ears from overheard – a rolling vr-d-lee?, despite hearing it twice more and frantically searching the skies overhead, I could not see it’s maker. Despite listening to calls of numerous birds on the internet, I have not been able to ID it. The nearest thing so far has been Snow Bunting, which was one of my prime suspects.
A final scan of the lake and the surrounding visible area produced one final bird for the census, an unexpected imm. Greater White-fronted Goose, loafing by the mouth of the river. One last hurrah indeed!
As I could get to pretty much all the nets I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon taking down nets and stowing net poles in the rafters of the banding lab. A flock of 17 (my lucky number) Red Crossbills flew over and the Clark’s Nutcrackers screeched their final farewells.
A successful season? I think so!
Season total of birds banded: 1817
Tatlayoko Lake Bird Observatory 