With a shorter day yesterday Gabe and I decided to take a late season jaunt up Potato Mountain to do some birding and iNating. It was a delightful walk up to the top where there is a lovely little lake on which awaited two Hooded Mergansers and a Green-winged Teal. Birds were moving through in numbers as a continuous flock of Yellow-rumped Warblers (of both subspecies) accompanied by Ruby-crowned Kinglets and Dark-eyed Juncos worked their way westward along the southern treeline. Golden-crowned Kinglets and Mountain Chickadees were plentiful as they called out to us all along the trail. Despite taking pictures of various plants for iNaturalist I nearly forgot to take a photo for this post (see above).
The savage southerly that has kept our banding totals in check for a few days now blew through the night and was still wantonly throwing aspen leaves about when we set out for the station this morning. We would only be able to open a single net (net 15) which after two and a half hours we were forced to close without capturing a single bird.
American Pipits were the species of the day as flock after flock would wheel, call and land in the north field before being spooked by something only they could sense, prompting them to fly off southwards over our heads and out of sight. Sometimes mere moments and at other times minutes later, another flock would arrive and perform a variation of the same spectacle. We would end the morning with a new station high count for this species, smashing the previous record of 158 (2018), with an estimated total of 280 individual pipits during the four hours that we operated!
Yellow-rumped Warblers, mainly the Myrtle subspecies, were again on the move as we would log 267 butterbutts for a current season total of 5,582 detections! With two more days to go we have already secured the second highest season total for this species behind 2020’s record of 7,538. That year on the 25th of September we set a new single day record with 2,187 butterbutts in four and a half hours of observation! The beautiful resident Golden-crowned Kinglets were out in force for the first time this season with 29 individuals detected as they would announce themselves with their high-pitched and gently pleasing calls from the shrubbery whilst foraging for micromoths alongside their migratory cousins the Ruby-crowned Kinglets. While on census I stopped to comb through one such flock and was pleasantly surprised to find the bright yellows of a Townsend’s Warbler amidst the otherwise tarnished golden hues of the court.
With only two more days left in our songbird monitoring season we hope that the forecast for an overall calming of the winds overnight is indeed correct. Stay tuned for Sachi’s final blog post of 2023 tomorrow which will be followed by a much more in-depth and information-rich “Season Finale” post by yours truly on the 28th. With any luck we will be able to squeeze some more owling nights between now and then.
To see our eBird list for the day, please visit: https://ebird.org/checklist/S150819070
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(There was no bird banding today due to high winds)
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Daily | Season | ||
Birds Banded | 0 | Total Banded | 848 |
Species Banded | 0 | Standard Banded | 834 |
Birds Recapped | 0 | Species Banded | 53 |
Species Recapped | 0 | Total Recapped | 164 |
Species on Census | 21 | Species Recapped | 17 |
Species Recorded | 34 | Species Recorded | 143 |
Did anyone answer the call for identification of that mystery “black” bird?
The answer is: A very back lit Varied Thrush