Weekend Banding Extravaganza Part 1

Non Birding Bill went away to New York for the weekend and I found myself a bachelorette for a few days. I had some plans for songbird banding at Mr. Neil's on Sunday, but called my buddy Amber and asked if she wanted to go up for the day on Saturday to Frank's to band hawks and then come back on Sunday to band songbirds. She was game and I was glad for the good company. I was a touch worried that I had jinxed our banding weekend. I dropped NBB off at the airport at 4am on Friday, came home and fell asleep, missing Friday banding at Carpenter. I figured I would get in enough practice over the weekend. I worried with the few birds on Saturday that Sunday would be a bummer. I was wrong.

We got in a couple of sharp-shinned hawks. It's still a bit early in the season, but a slow day in a hawk blind is better than a great day in the office. We didn't see huge amounts of hawks flying the skies but that left time for jokes and witty witty repartee--not unlike the Algonquin Round Table, only substitute painful bird puns for witty repartee and waxy chocolate donuts, cheetos, and gas station coffee for martinis.

We got in a cute little female kestrel. It's always surprising when a kestrel comes into the nets--they're about the same size as the bait pigeon and it's surprising that they think prey that size is a good idea. She was a passage (hatched this year) bird, so perhaps she's still trying to figure out what is sensible prey.

After she was banded and released she landed on a spruce. A second female kestrel (on the left) landed on a spruce near her. I wonder if these two were in the same nest this past summer? The bird we released started preening her. Amber's boyfriend says that the birds are muttering, "Damn greasy primates!" after having been handled and banded. The second kestrel soon followed suit, even though she had not been banded. She was cute, she kept rubbing the top of her head on the spruce top--a great way to scratch those itchy feather shafts.

One of the sharp-shinned hawks that flew in had just hunted successfully. Te toes were covered with blood and had a couple of feathers still stuck to them. The feathers were a bit olive. Amber and I were trying to suss out what the prey could have been--warbler, sparrow? We think we figured it out during the next day's songbird banding.

We stayed until about 4pm, only three birds had been banded up to that point--2 sharp-shinned hawks and a kestrel. I'll be back up later this season--hopefully with photos of goshawks.

Marathon Birding & Banding Weekend

Just came off from a wild weekend of banding. I'm feeling as rough as this mid-molt robin looks. We did a little bit of hawk banding and a whole lotta songbird banding. Here is a tiny video of a kestrel that we got into the nets. She was very fascinated with my purple nail polish:

Skywatch Friday & Carpenter Nature Center

It's Skywatch Friday again and I was out at Carpenter Nature Center this morning and thought I'd get a shot of sky. The sky was crisp and blue. And though it's a lovely shade of blue, when put in the blog, it looks more like I just placed a blue box in the post. It needs some accents. Since there were no clouds to oblige, I had to work with earthly accents.

How about some goldenrod? I think this is the start of my favorite time of year at Carpenter. In late summer and early fall the prairie comes alive with color of yellows, reds, greens...

The asters are starting to burst open to. The purple itself is fine, but add a touch of that gorgeous blue sky is all part of the pallet.

And it's not just the flowers, monarchs and swallowtails are nectaring on every blooming thing. This is a giant swallowtail on a a thistle. Note that sea of goldenrod capped off with a beautiful blue sky in the background. At Birds and Beers last night, I had a conversation with bird banders Roger and Mark about goldenrod fields and all the birds that lurk in them this time of year. They mentioned how many warblers are down in them. We had a net up in a goldenrod/sumac/dogwood field at Carpenter this morning and it was our most active net.

We got in a couple of Wilson's warblers (or WIWA according to the American Ornithologists' code) like the bird above and a Nashville...and oodles of flycatchers. Flycatchers just kind of take the wind out of my sails when banding. We get both alder and willow flycatchers in Minnesota and telling them apart this time of year (when they aren't singing) involves algebra (that's not an exaggeration). What heck kind of sadist has to ruin birding with math. I always feel like Tom Hanks in A League of their Own: "There's no math in birding! There's no math in birding!"

Here a second Wilson's. It's so buttery yellow--you can imagine how well it would hide in those goldenrod fields while gleaning insects off the flowers.

Check out the bottoms of the WIWA's foot--it's super yellow. Warblers are just cool from head to toe.

We did have a rather interesting chickadee show up-- it was missing a foot! Fortunately, not the banded foot, so we were able to find out that we banded it last fall and it was healthy and had two feet when it was first banded. Wonder what happened? Did the toes freeze off over the winter? Did the bird fly into a window, injure its foot, resulting in a severe infection that caused the toes to fall off? Did it get bumblefoot?

Another surprise was finding a goldfinch incubating two eggs this late in August. I know goldfinches nest late, but this seems really late for Minnesota. Will be interesting to watch its progress over the next few weeks.

Birding the Minnesota & South Dakota Border

Don't worry, this post isn't all shorebirds.

On a Friday I was watching these little semi-palmated plovers squabbling on a beach and then the very next day, I'm watching them on a mud flat in western Minnesota...

And getting prickly pear cactus paddles stuck on my leg--owie. Yes, we do have a couple of cactus species growing in Minnesota, you can see them at Big Stone NWR. I went with Stan Tekiela and a group from Staring Lake Outdoor Center in Eden Prairie. These are fun, low key trips where we see some great birds...

...and local color like the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota (if you're wondering if this is the famed ball from Weird Al Yankovic song, it is).

We also stopped at the headwaters of the Minnesota River. Which was chock full of American white pelicans.

They were fishing right at the dam--I think I have a video of it, I'll see if I can dig it out of the external drive and load it later today. These were some urban birds. They did not care about us coming too close at all.

Usually white pelicans around the state are a bit cautious of humans, but these dudes just didn't care.

The fishing must be that good...and hopefully not too polluted right at the headwaters, unlike some of the other parts.

I got a kick out of seeing a band on one of the pelicans, perhaps this is a bird that I banded? If I didn't do it, I'm sure it's part of that same colony, it's very close to the Minnesota Headwaters.

We were hoping to find some shorebirds while we were out here, since Amber and I went on the shorebird workshop and had a great time last year. The weather had not been as cooperative this year. There was a big storm a few days before we arrived and all the prime mud flats were now ponds--not the best stopover for migrating shorebirds. We did find some like the least sandpiper above. The storm damage was incredible. The locals said there were 80 mile an hour winds and it showed in shredded corn fields, barns missing chunks of roof, and LOTS of trees down.

We went to Salt Lake right on the Minnesota/South Dakota border and found more shorebirds there like the Wilson's phalaropes (and lone pectoral sandpiper) in the above photo. It had the best and most accessible variety of shorebirds on the trip including short-billed dowitcher and stilt sandpipers.

This group wasn't all about shorebirds either, and we found black terns and a single Forster's tern (above).

The big stars of the show for the group was the massive amount of swallows around Salt Lake. I tried to get a video of this, but it's so windy and shaky that I think people would get motion sickness if I put it up on YouTube. But see this little section of swallows, it went on for as far as you could see the fence line. There were literally hundreds of swallows of various species. We found bank, barn, tree, cliff, and northern rough-winged swallow all hanging out and staging on the fence.

There was also a family group of savannah sparrows on the fence too. They appeared to have one fledgling with them--go native sparrows! Squeeze in one more brood before you migrate south!

We were seeing quite a few flickers as well and there was a family group with some fledgling flickers too. Young flickers begging always throw me. Yesterday, I was biking a different trail and I heard some begging at first I thought it was a raptor begging, until I saw the young flickers. I have to say, if you are in the Twin Cities and like to bird and bike--the Cedar Lake Trail is GREAT right now. I can't believe the diversity of species right on the edge of downtown. I found a fledging red-shouldered hawk, an adult Cooper's hawk, a pileated woodpecker, red-eyed vireo, indigo bunting and I got dove at by a male bluebird guarding his nest box--it wasn't my fault, someone put the bluebird box right next to the bike trail. It was also encouraging to see another species going for the gold with a late nesting.

Now, I just need to find a way to attach my spotting scope to my bike handle bars so I can digiscope--then I'll be unstoppable!

Banded American Oystercaters

While birding at South Beach in Cape Cod last week, we found some banded American oystercatchers. Above is number 52. At first, I was going to enter its information to the Bird Banding Lab (where one typically submits found band numbers), but the yellow tags with fairly easy to read numbers usually means there's a specific study. Sure enough, I went to google, entered "banded oystercatcher" and found AMOY Banding--someone is doing a specific oystercatcher study! Based on the yellow bands, I was able to figure out that this bird was banded in Massachusetts. I submitted my siting and today got this info from Shiloh Schulte of the Zoology Department of North Carolina State University :

"The bird you saw was banded on South Monomoy as a chick in July 2004. This bird overwinters on the west coast of Florida near Cedar Key. This is the first report of the bird on the breeding grounds since the year it hatched. Reports like yours really help us understand how oystercatchers move and use habitat throughout the year. Please let us know if you see more bands!"

Looking over my photos, I now see that more oystercatchers were banded, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to read the bands--at least three birds in the above photo are banded. So, if you see any oystercatchers, double check to see if they are banded. The colors are not just yellow, there's green, blue, red, and black as well.

Young Grosbeak

So, I'm in Rhode Island at the moment hanging at the Swarovski Headquarters. I'm eating lunch (real mashed potatoes, thank you very much, Swarovski Cafe) under a large crystal chandalier. Ah life. I'm giggling too because Non Birding Bill has just sent me a link to a limited edition Beverly Hills 90210 iPod Nano. But, if I download all the episodes, will I still have room for birdJam?

Check out this funky bird in hand that we got in at Carpenter Nature Center last Friday (boy am I behind on some blog entries or what. To those who are not as familiar with birds this might be a tad confusing but banding wise this was a fairly easy bird to figure out. We didn't have to debate too much with the Pyle over it. It's a hatch year male rose breasted grosbeak. Normally you have to look at feathers and see if they're truncate and fresh or relatively abraded, blah blah blah. But, because this dude looks like a female grosbeak with pink on the undersides of the wings, that tells us he's fresh from the nest and male.

It this upclose head shot you can see the gape at the corners of his beak indicating a young bird. Don't get me wrong, even though he's young, that beak is still quite capable of breaking the skin. Here's hoping he survives his first migration and visits us again next spring.

Okay, now back to looking at naked binoculars.

A Waxwing And Some Woodpeckers

Check out what we got in the nets on Friday at Carpenter Nature Center. No that's not a female cardinal tarted up with excessive eyeliner, that's a cedar waxwing. There are waxwings around Carpenter, and by their behavior, I'm sure they are nesting, but I am always too distracted to figure out where the nest is.

We were actually able to age this bird. Notice something missing? Check the wings--there's no "wax" on the wing. This is actually a second year bird (it hatched last summer). Waxwings do not get those red waxy tips until their second fall. The waxy tips are the result of a astaxanthin, a carotenoid pigment. We also had to measure the yellow tips on the tail--they are shorter in younger birds than they are in the adult birds.

Here's a female red-winged blackbird. These birds just look kind of like an overgrown sparrow when you see the flying around marshes, but they are quite pretty up close and in hand. Note that she also has reddish shoulder patches, similar to the male of the species.

The big excitement of the day was a male northern flicker in the net. You can tell he's male by his black mustache. I had actually just stepped outside with a male goldfinch that I had just banded and was thinking, "Oh, this would be a good picture for the blog, when I noticed something large in the net with a white rump. I immediately let the goldfinch go (we'll get more, so I can get a photo another day) and walked quickly to the nets.

The flicker started to fly and I noticed that it was actually on the other side of the net than I was on. Also, as it flew, I could see it was only caught by one foot. I heard more banders coming out of the building so I just reached through the net, and put my hand over the flick and secured it against my body. Our master bander, Jim Fitzpatrick got hold of the flicker on my side and I went to the other side of the net. In less than a minute, the flicker was out of the net, and Jim banded him.

The bird was a study in elegant design, beauty--not bad for an ant specialist. Check out the yellow feather shafts on the wing feathers that give this bird the old name "yellow-shafted flicker."

Check out that yellow when it flies.

Another interesting bird that came in was a recently fledged red-bellied woodpecker. It looks enough like a red-bellied woodpecker, but the red on the head is a little weird and doesn't match up with the coloration on males and females.

Another interesting bird that came in was a recently fledged red-bellied woodpecker. This bird just had a small red patch on the top of the head. So, we had to break out the Peter Pyle banding book to see if we could find a clear way to sex this bird. We could measure either the spikey part of the tongue, or the culmen--which is basically the upper mandible of the bird. Females have smaller culmens and tongue tips than males. We came up with female based on measurements.

I also pointed out the gape on the above bird. That's one way you can tell an immature bird in some species, that yellow corner on the bill. Keep your eye open for that with the birds that are showing up at your feeders.

Longevity

Took a little bit of a blogging break over the weekend. Non Birding Bill and I celebrated our ten year wedding anniversary. Always nice to reestablish the pair bond.

I had longevity on the brain on Friday, not only by anticipating the weekend, but because we got some old birds in the nets at Carpenter Nature Center. Normally, we'll get one or two retraps in a session and one of those birds might be a few years old, but this time we got in several older downy woodpeckers. There must have been something in the air:

A downy woodpecker originally banded 5-2-03 as an after second year bird was retrapped 5-30-08!

Another downy woodpecker originally banded on 11-14-03 as an after hatch year bird was retrapped on 12-19-03, 4-28-06 and 5-30-08.

A third downy woodepecker originally banded 11-5-04 and retrapped 5-30-08!

Though our oldest down on Friday was over seven years old and possibly a record for Carpenter, that's not the oldest down woodpecker. According to the Bird Banding Lab, the oldest downy woodpecker on record was eleven years old and eleven month.

My Life As A Part Time Park Ranger

So, in April, I got a part-time job as a park ranger for the Mississippi River and it is a great time! I work primarily at the Mississippi River Visitor's Center at the Science Museum of Minnesota but I do get a chance to get out in the field. Last week, a group of staff went canoeing along the Vermillion Bottoms. What a joy to canoe in spring and get to know some of the people who work for the parks like the Historian, Botany Bob, and Rock Girl (nicknames all based on their areas of expertise--although Non Birding Bill said that we sounded like some sad band of super heroes: "The Historian and Birdchick canoe the river using their magical interpretation skills to save the people!")

I had a great time, the birding was fantastic. I couldn't really take my digiscoping equipment in the canoe, but still could watch the birds. Above, you might notice a bright yellow spot in that pile of brush--that was one of about eight prothonotary warblers we saw. You can't really tell it from the photo, but we could see them very well with the naked eyes. We heard parulas (and other warblers), had a flock of caspian terns fly over, saw one sandhilll crane, lots of eagles and I was totally surprised to see a flock of common nighthawks hawking for insects above our heads. I figured these normally nocturnal birds were mid-migration and very hungry.

We stopped for bit and had lunch along the river. We were there at least thirty minutes and a few of us snuck off into the woods to...see a man about a horse. As I was working my way back, I heard a strange noise right about where the above photo was taken. I pished a few times and a few seconds later a HUGE turkey hen burst out of the grass...almost causing me to relieve myself on the spot. All of us should have noticed a turkey lurking in the grass during lunch...unless she was totally hunkered on a nest. I walked over to where she burst forth:

There were the eggs. Poor thing must have been terrified when we pulled up our canoes and started eating. We had finished our lunch so we packed up as quick as we could and left to give her a chance to come back to her nest of fourteen eggs.

You do see quite a bit of litter along the river, one of the most disturbing piece we found was this two liter bottle of 7-Up filled to the brim with used hypodermic needles. EW!

Canoeing isn't the only thing I've been up to. The week before the canoeing, I got to go out and follow along with some of the eagle banding happening along the Mississippi River.

Even though the bald eagle is off the endangered species list, it's a good idea to keep tabs on them. Because they are so high on the food chain on the river, the researchers are using the eagles as an indicator species--if something is affecting them, it's eventually going to affect the humans. The birds all have a bit of blood drawn that's DNA tested and also checked for pollutants. Because the research is still going on, I can't give all the details at the moment...but it does make me want to be a bit more choosy about what part of the river I would eat fish from.

Check out those eagle toes! I will say that it was fun to work with big birds in my banding comfort zone as opposed to those teeny warblers.

Professional tree climbers from out west were brought in to get the eagle chicks out of the nest. It was way cool to watch them work. They used a crossbow with an arrow and string attached. Once the arrow made it over an appropriate branch, a climbing rope was added and then the guys would climb the rope into the trees. It was impressive to say the least.

It was interesting to notice the animals living the trees with the eagle nest. One tree had an oriole nest a few feet away. Above, a guy from the DNR was measuring the circumference of the nest tree when he shouted, "Hey, there's something nesting in here...and it's furry." He didn't want to stick his hand in, so I gave him my camera to stick in the hole and snap a photo:

At first, we weren't sure what they were. I wondered if they were otter, but if you look at the back paws, that gives them away. Do you know? They're baby raccoons--prey, right in the base of a tree with an eagle nest!

There have been requests to see the park ranger uniform:

If you're thinking "Wow, a badge and a cool hat--that's gotta be fun!"

It is.

If you're at the Science Museum, stop in and say hello.

Carpenter Banding In May

We had a great sampling of birds come into the nets on Friday...and lots of people came to enjoy the beautiful day outdoors and watch what we do at Carpenter Nature Center. I have finished my banding class and am an official apprentice--with a certificate. I'm not sure what I will eventually do with this, my primary goal was just to be a better volunteer for Carpenter and I really do feel so much better taking birds out of nets and processing them now--even birds like Bitey McBitersons in the above photo (Bitey McBitersons is the lesser known folk name of the quick to nip northern cardinal). The little boy in the above photo is Aaron. He and his mother followed us around and Aaron was a big help to me--when we would have several birds in the nets, I would put them in bags and he helped carry the bags back to the processing station. Several bags of chickadees, sparrows, and warblers can be heavy. It's always nice to encounter a helpful gentleman in the field--thanks, Aaron! Check out the awesomeness that is the clay-colored sparrow! Drink in its brown and gray goodness. We had two come into the nets just about a foot from each other. I suspect it was some territorial chasing on their part. Okay, now note the bill of the clay-colored sparrow above. Now, check out the second one below:

It had some kind of nasty gunk on the tip. I wondered if it had foraged and got some mud on the tip or if it had been eating some old berries that crusted up the tips or what was going on. The bird appeared otherwise to be very healthy.

A big highlight of the day was this female Canada warbler. Even though she's not as bright as the male, she is a very striking bird. Another highlight was a chickadee that was already banded. When we looked up its banding number, we discovered that the female chickadee was first trapped and banded in January 2003 and at that time she was in her second year. Think of that--a six year old female chickadee still going strong. Incredible!

Common yellow throats were probably the most common warble we got in the nets. I just love these guys up close. As we were getting birds out of the nets, I didn't have my binoculars or my digiscoping equipment with me, guaranteeing that something super cool would fly by--and it did. A red-tailed hawk with a snake! At first, I thought it was a falconry bird with jesses and a leash hanging down (Jim said some falconers had been by recently tracking a "lost" red-tail, but that bird did not have a leash, just two jesses, or leather anklets attached). Another Carpenter volunteer was smart and had his binoculars handy and could see that it was, in fact a snake. What was strange was that the red-tail disappeared in the trees with the snake and about ten minutes later reappeared and just kind of hung in the air with the snake hanging behind it. The hawk didn't appear to be in any rush to get it to a nest or land and eat it, just kind of slowly grabbed a thermal and glided along. I later asked my buddy Amber if she had any idea why the red-tail would appear to be carrying the snake around, almost as if flying with a type of trophy, showing it off. That's not a smart thing to do, if anything it kind of advertises to other predators to come and steal your food. She wondered if the adult red-tail had young in the nest and it was about time for them to leave and it was advertising the snake to get them to fly out and learn to hunt on their own? That seems very plausible, but once again, birds leave me with more questions than answers.