Birds of a feather

Tags

American Robin, bird, bird banding, birding, Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis, Catharus guttatus, colour variation, Hermit Thrush, Melospiza melodia, Mist-netting, photography, Song Sparrow, Turdus migratorius, White Throated Sparrow, Zonotrichia albicollis

I was helping a friend with a bird banding project yesterday morning and I thought you might enjoy a few photos.  We were out from just at dawn to nearly noon (more than four hours) and the temperature was just above freezing, with a heavy mist.

Naturally, I was wearing shorts and trainers that were rapidly soaked through, so instead of composing a clever blog post, I spent the walk back daydreaming about putting a heat pack in the microwave and the various places on my body I would subsequently put it (feet, mostly).

So here are is a whole heap of photos and anecdotes, without much of a story.

This AMRO (American Robin, Turdus migratorius) was already banded, which is sufficiently rare to be notable.

My aren't you a handsome fellow?

We blow on their feathers to see how fat they are after the winter.

It is her first time banding.

We caught a whole flock of WHSP (White Throated Sparrows, Zonotrichia albicollis), this one is pretty plain, but some are gorgeous.

Same species, showing colour variation. They are very sweet.

Measuring wing length.

I've never seen anyone weigh a bird this way. It doesn't hurt them, but it is a little undignified.

Unfortunately for us, we caught a lot of NOCAs (Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis). They are fiery rangas!

Owww...I also have quite a few bite marks and blisters from their bites yesterday.

Another new bander, this one is brave.

Sometimes we give the cardinals a stick to bite onto while we're working.

Lady cardinals don't seem to be as aggro...

Another lady cardinal, although a male would match this ranga's beard better!

A lovely SOSP (Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia) is a nice break after the cardinals.

She is very calm.

A nice bird to start on for one of our youngest banders.

Our most exciting bird of the day! A HETH (Hermit Thrush, Catharus guttatus). Just look at those big brown eyes.

Mr. Thrush, are you a second year bird? Looking for buffy coverts.

A stereotypical Hermit Thrush pose, with cocked tail.

Last bird of the day was a White Throated Sparrow and you can see how red my hands are! I was fumbling with bands by this point.

A Fairy Tale

Tags

Australia, bird banding, fairy wren, Mist-netting, storytelling, tall tales

Once upon a humid summer, I worked with an ornithologist from Arkansas. He was quite the character…he had a strong southern accent, but he could put it on and take it off like his old rumpled cowboy hat.  He could play the banjo and the ukelele.  We drove to the field sites every day in his tiny Toyota Corolla, and let me tell you, packing five sweaty field biologists and a whole slew of mist netting and banding gear into a Toyota Corolla is no small feat, especially without air conditioning.

He would play true blue Arkansas music in that thing.  The only song I remember, though, is Cool, Clear Water.  This’ll give you an idea of his personality.

On top of being a very clever field biologist, he loved telling stories.  Often, the stories would begin in a completely logical and credible fashion, but slowly little red flags would go up as he spoke, and they would gradually accumulate until my rapt listening gaze was transformed into a skeptical frown.  So believe what you will, and I won’t be responsible.

For example, he spent some time working in Australia, looking at extra pair paternity in fairy wrens. (That’s promiscuity in the females, when there is more than one male parent of the offspring.)

Wait, do you know about fairy wrens?  If you live in the UK, most of your bird names are boring, but in Oz, they have a lot of fun naming birds.  There is a Lovely fairy wren, a Splendid fairy wren, a Magnificent fairy wren, a Superb fairy wren…I could go on.

It really is a splendid fairy wren. Stolen from the internet because I never could catch a photo of one: animalworld.tumblr.com

Well, this Arkansasian told us that it is difficult to mist net fairy wrens.  They travel about in big groups, close to the ground.  They like thick brambly bush, with lots of thorns.  They are both shy and smart.  All of these factors make them very difficult to catch and band.

Well, since there are a lot of invasive rabbits in Australia, they’ve been leaving these gaping rabbit holes everywhere.  The kangaroos and wallabies aren’t used to them, so while hopping about, they accidentally step in them and break off their legs.  Then they die, because they can’t hop away (I’m making sad cooing noises by now).

But in their skeletons, they leave these foot and ankle bones broken off perfectly, just like a boomerang, right?  So we would collect these bones, and hurl them like boomerangs, and use them to shoo the flocks into the nets.

A roorang? (NB: no kangaroos were harmed in the making of this image)

At this point, my mouth hanging slightly ajar, I would stare at him for a moment.  He was completely deadpan the whole time, never batted an eyelash.  He would meet my gaze, nod, and say, “Whelp, better get back to work!  Them goldfinches won’t catch themselves and I have a mean hankering for a Mint Julep.”

Net got your tongue?

Tags

Animals, Birds, Mist-netting

Here’s another mist-netting adventure for you.  Again, the setting is the swamps of northern Ohio, the southernmost retreat of the glacial moraine.  In my last mist-netting post, I mentioned that we often have unexpected by-catch.  In fact, we frequently had non-Goldfinch avian visitors to the nets.  I actually thought this was pretty neat most of the time; I got the chance to not only see up close, but also to hold many of the bird species in the area.  We accidentally caught Song Sparrows, Yellow Warblers, Chickadees, Cardinals, Wood Thrushes, Grey Catbirds, Common Yellowthroats, and one time a Ruby Throated Hummingbird.  Some of them were more fun than others…Goldfinches are real sweet hearts compared to some of the other birds.  For example, the cardinals have a nasty bite!

Once we caught a Baltimore Oriole.  If you haven’t seen one, they are a gorgeous neon orange and black.  They have a pretty song too.  The way to attract them to your yard is to nail half an orange to a fence post or tree.  They are quite enamored with oranges because they are nectar feeders.

As you may or may not know, bird tongues can be quite different from human tongues.  The nectarivorous birds, like orioles, have strangely feathered and fluted tongues that are specially adapted for sipping sweet things.

Tongues of different orioles.

Unfortunately for our melodious friend, his bristly tongue was all caught up in the fine mesh of the net.  It took us nearly 30 minutes to carefully extract his tongue without harming him.  After his ordeal, we gave him some (orange) Gatorade, the sports drink of athletic birds, and released him.  He was not harmed at all, but it was stressful for everyone involved, I think.

Don’t lose your head…

Tags

Hornets, Mist-netting

Staying calm in the field is a vital skill for any field biologist…but that’s really not what this story is about.  It’s actually just a terrible pun…I just couldn’t help myself.

For this story, let me take you to the swamps of northern Ohio.  The geologic history of the location is the southern most extent of the last glacial moraine.  The swamp is a protected wildlife habitat and a park.  It is full of lush thickets of blackberry and poison ivy, shoulder high rushes and dense stands of cattails, glades of Crataegus (hawthorn) and batches of thistle.  In short, it is the ideal habitat for our study organism, the American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis).

Goldfinches love secondary succession type habitat, low brush, ideally with lots of brambles.  They build their nests a bit later in the season than most birds.

I have to say, if I were a baby bird, I would want to live in a Goldfinch nest.  They construct the most lovely, silky soft pillow nests, made from thistle fluff and cattail down.  They look very comfortable!

Our work that summer was to wade through brush and bramble to search behind every leaf on every branch of every bush in the entire park to find those lovely little nests.  We were doing a study on the behavioral ecology of these birds, and we needed to know all about their nesting and mating success rates.

Another part of the job, perhaps more enjoyable, involved mist netting birds.  A mist net is a vertical net that is made of fibers as fine as human hair.  They are a terrible mess if they get tangled, as you can imagine, and so there is a very strict protocol for folding and storing them.  Setting them up in brambles is a nightmare.

A bird in the hand (male American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis))

Once these nets are set up, they are almost impossible to see.  I almost walked into them myself a few times!  We set up a thistle seed feeder on the other side of the nets and the Goldfinches get caught as they fly in for a snack.  After they are caught, we remove them very carefully, put a band on their leg for identification, take some measurements, and let them fly.  If they are feeling stressed, we give them a bit of Gatorade.

Unfortunately, we often caught other things in the net by accident.  One of the worst by-catches was the hornets.  They become so angry when they are caught that they just buzz around, making a terrible knot in the net.

European Hornets (Vespa cabro) are actually "gentle giants".

I was trying to remove such a specimen one day, when it buzzed around hard enough to decapitate itself.  I was saddened by this, but its body was still buzzing, so I continued to try and free it.  Eventually, I did get the body free, and I was shocked to see it fly away in a straight line, as if it had business to attend to.

I guess, if you are an insect, it is not such a big deal to lose your head.

Insects like hornets (of the order Hymenoptera) have neural ganglia in their thorax and abdomen as well as their head.  Apparently, their nervous systems are not as centralized as our own, allowing them much more flexibility after losing their brains.  It has also been shown that the muscle movement that allows the wings to beat and the insect to fly is a reflex which does not require the brain to operate.