I haven't been out and about or posted in quite some time. Other than the bird surveys and Canada Goose banding this summer, I haven't really done much feild work or birding. Mainly because of my needed presence at home due to my Mother's battle with cancer, a battle that came to an end August 5, 2012. A week later, I was off to start my new job as a community assistant here at State College and get ready for the new school year. So far, so good! In fact, I was invited into the "Bird World" just recently, and am thrilled to be back!
Last week I received an e-mail offering a Bird Bander's Training class here at Penn State, how could I pass that up? We met last Thursday evening in the Forest Resources building to go over a few things regaurding the banding process, why we band birds, do's and dont's of banding, species identification, etc. We were to meet Saturday morning at the Arboretum at Penn State, but the rainy weather forced us to push the banding back a day. Sunday morning I got up at 6:00 AM, packed my clipboard, binoculars, notebook, some water and a quick snack, and my Peterson's, and was on my way to meet the banding crew. I arrived at the Air Quality site at about 6:45. As soon as all the members of the group had arrived, we made our way to the sites and began to set our mist nets.
Setting up mist nets first thing in the morning, you already know that it's going to be a good day!
After all the nets were set, it had taken us about 45 minutes, we decided to check the first two nets for the possibility of there being a few birds. As we arrived at site 1, sure enough there was our first capture of the day, a hatch year Red-eyed Vireo. We then approached the second site to find a male Northern Cardinal.
Dr. Brittingham recovering our catch from the net.
We took the two birds to our banding station for processing, and released them with a new peice of jewelry. While processing, we record the bird's wing chord, tail length, fat content, weight, species, age, sex, and of course, band number. By the time we had processed the two birds, it was time to go check the nets again. This time we brought back quite a few! The highlight of this group of birds was a yellow-bellied flycatcher.
A not-so-good shot of a Yellow-bellied Flycatcher.
We had some great birds throughout the morning, such as an American Redstart, Mourning, Wilson's, and Canada Warblers, Least, Willow, and 2 more Yellow-bellied Flycatchers!
Least Flycatcher
Female Northern Cardinal
These were all great birds to have the oppourtunity to handle and get such great looks at. But the best surprise of the morning for me was when I ran into the bander in charge and another student on the trail with ear-to-ear grins. I asked them if they caught something cool, and the smiles got even bigger. They both replied, Sharp-Shinned Hawk....! I enjoy seeing songbirds and I really like seeing waterfowl and water birds, but anytime I see a bird of prey of ANY species, I am over whelmed with excitement. Unfortunately we could not band the sharpie due to lack of proper band size, but we got some great looks at the bird and I was able to get a quick picture with the star of the show before releasing the raptor.
Hatch year Sharp-shinned Hawk
Hatch year Sharp-shinned Hawk
Hatch year Sharp-shinned Hawk, you can tell the age of this bird because of the streaking on the face and breast, overall buffy brown coloration, and a yellow eye.
An adult will have a rusty red breast, gray back and head, and a deep red eye.
I was extremely happy with the way the first day of banding went. We ended with 33 handled birds. 31 newly banded birds, 1 recapture, and 1 released without a band. There were a total of 16 different species. The recapture was an ovenbird that was originally banded on September 3, 2010. I have 7 more days of banding scheduled this semester, hopefully I can schedule more!
Also, I just recieved an e-mail from a waterfowl biologist in Northwestern Pennsylvania stating that it is predicted to be a BIG flight year for waterfowl. He has banded over 400 teal in 2 weeks, tripling any previous year in TOTAL numbers of teal. This is good news assuming that during the spring migration I didn't do as well as I would have liked to with waterfowl and the like. So needless to say, I am really looking forward to this fall's migration!!!
Here is a link to an eBird checklist of the birds tallied last Sunday.
