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Mr. Blazis' e-mails

6/17/08

To all my birdbanding team-mates:
 
GREAT news!  It's probably a historical first for any sportsman's club in the country:  we now have an official birdbanding committee as part of the Auburn Sportsman's Club!  J.J. White is chairman of the committee (a GREAT choice for this leadership position, considering his venerable ties with the club and the great degree of respect everyone has for him, not to mention his great expertise banding bluebirds and tree swallows);  Keith MacAdams is co-chairman, (another GREAT choice and honor to a man who is a backbone of our research team;  he is a true leader and deserves this position to reflect his importance to the club membership.  No one works harder for us.)  We had overwhelming support of our program following our presentation to the membership and trustees.  Many of them were already good friends, but by evening's end, we had won over all of those who didn't really know what great things the team was doing in conservation, education, and research (migration and Lyme disease).  This is a wonderful moment to celebrate, as it solidifies our position in the future plans for the Auburn Sportsman's Club.  I encourage as many possible birdbanding team members to join the club and support them, in turn.  There may come a time that we need your vote at a critical meeting, too.  Thanks to all birdbanding team members who were with us tonight. 
 
Mark Blazis

Mr. Blazis' e-mails

6/3/08

To all my birdbanding team (and David Sheridan's principal!):
 
Helen Blazis' class of special education students, because of problems at their school with buses, graduation, the predicted thunderstorms on Wednesday, etc., will be coming on MONDAY morning, June 9, instead.  That's approaching the end of our migratory banding season (those who do birdbanding monitoring avian productivity and survivorship of young actually just get started banding at this time, trying to band every breeding adult on a property along with all their young during the next 10 weeks, and that was a research project that I did for 12 years in Grafton, to try to determine trends in breeding populations of our migratory birds), with most birds already being on the nest, but still with a possibility of yellowbellied flycatcher, Acadian flycatcher etc.  David Sheridan and Mary Sharkey, I hope that date is okay for you both.  I would like to target band that day with you prairie warbler.  (I found two males on territory in the gravel pits, each of which is very bandable, along with several towhees on territory over there.)  Gary, if you could have the poles and a 20 ft. net ready, we'll show them how we do it.  Not all students will be able to participate, so Helen might remain back with the severely handicapped student(s).  I really don't want to disappoint these special kids.  I KNOW we can target band some very special species for them and take them into some spots that we usually don't go into.  I was exploring yesterday, following deer tracks; I saw a fox along the way, hunting rodents.  The wildflowers are changing, and I'm seeing early summer species replacing our spring species.  We'll give them a great experience, no matter what.  All that can help out, I'd greatly appreciate.  Ken, Larry, Lois, and any students out of school, your presence would be greatly appreciated.   
 
Mark Blazis

6/2/08

Monday June 2.  The birdbanding spring season is trickling to a halt.  We closed early, before 10 am.  Only 6 birds this morning despite good winds last night.  Females are mostly on their nests now.  There are still some birds (mourning warblers, gray cheeked thrushes, and yellow-bellied flycatchers) traveling north, so we'll stay in operation for about another week. 
 
J.J. White, the Godfather of the bluebird and true swallow banding program with us has some disturbing news:  numbers of nesting tree swallows is down about one third this spring.  Not good. 
 
The station was run by Mary Sharkey and Lois Kolofsky this morning.  They were absolutely professional.  Mary will be banding some eastern phoebes and black-capped chickadees that are in her nest boxes.  This is a little tricky.  You don't want to band them when they're too young, and you don't want to wait too long, as they can surprise you and leave the nest box before you expect them to.  Black-capped chickadees are often laying eggs as early as the time we start our spring banding season in early May.  Both the male and the female will incubate their eggs for about 12 or 13 days.  The hatchlings will stay in the nest for about 14 to 18 days, probably depending on the amount of food they've been given.  When we're not catching many of them in the spring, I know that they're busy with their nesting.  The problem for Mary is trying to band them just a couple days before they fledge.  When she goes up to the nest box, she might hear their famous snake-like hissing warning (a lot of bravado).  J.J. White monitors every bluebird nest box EVERY DAY, and that's dozens of boxes, a labor of love that takes up his entire spring.  He knows when the eggs were laid for each pair; when they all hatch, and when to expect them to fledge.  (He also knows if a nest has failed because of too many days of cold and rain or a lethal infestation of parasites, or, more commonly, the violent intrusion of house sparrows that wipe out many nests.)  He times his banding of them accordingly.  It's tricky if you don't monitor your nest boxes meticulously.    Eastern phoebes lay their eggs early too, most often in June around here.  They'll incubate for about 16 days, although that can vary a little:  one variable possibly being ambient temperatures.  (It can be pretty cold sometime in April or early May.)  They can be quite prolific and produce a second brood and sometimes, more uncommonly, even a third.  Down at our Cape Cod home, every year a pair builds a nest under the roof of our front entrance.  At the end of each season, I take the nest down and look at the mud and moss cup, lined with grass, a few feathers.  Its name is onomatopoetic, sounding like a rough or hoarse, two-syllable "phoe-be!"  We often identify this bird by its behavior, wagging it tail up and down as its perched.  Only a few other species (like Hermit thrush) do that.  This species is very important historically for us birdbanding researchers.  Audubon conducted the first American birdbanding experiment in Pennsylvania, placing silver wire around the legs of several birds that he captured.  There aren't too many bridges in our area that don't have a phoebe family nesting under or around them.
 
Our fiesty chickadee, that pecks us unmercifully when we're banding it (unlike the gentle warblers that never show any  aggression), is part of the Titmouse family, the Paridae.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that its cousin, the tufted titmouse also pecks the heck out of us when we're banding them.  Both species are like little Rocky Balboas, and I have to admire them for their feistiness, even though that can be particularly annoying.  They also have great energy and unbelievably strong legs for their size, often presenting us with the most difficult challenges of extricating them from the nets, as they kick and bite.   And, of course, they don't cooperate, pecking us during the entire operation.   This titmouse name comes from both and Old Icelandic word, 'TITRE",  that means anything small.  Mouse is a mis-spelling of "MASE", an Old English word for bird.  There are 65 species of these titmice in the world, including our chickadees.  In Europe, they are dominated by the various tits: blue tit, great tit etc. (You won't see chickadees at your feeder in Europe, but you will see lots of tits.)   Next time you band one of these Paridae, check out primary feather #10 on its wing, the outermost wing feather.  You'll note how it's strangely only about half the length of primary #9, the very next one.  This is way different from most of our other songbirds.  This is the only species that I've been able to get to land on my hand to take sunflower seeds near my feeder in winter.  They can be very tame, bold, and trusting.  One New Hampshire bird was banded until it was TWELVE YEARS OLD!  (very unusually for any songbird to live that long -- our longevity records have never gone over 7 years old.) 
 
We're taking the day off on Tuesday, preparing for a special education class that Helen Blazis will be bringing on Wednesday (weather permitting -- they're calling for some sporadic thunderstorms.  Weather date for that class would be Friday.).  Gary Hetel is preparing for his daughter's college graduation party, so the station will be run by Mary Sharkey and Ken Dion, who have been spectacular this spring. The migration is just dripping-slow now, and will come to an absolute halt in a matter of days, when all birds will have reached their nesting grounds and gotten down to the serious business of perpetuating their species.    

6/1/08

Great winds, last night.  But few birds.  (Only 19 were banded.)  Still some yellow-throats, black-and-white- warblers, veery's, and WOODTHRUSH.  Here's the Pavarotti of the forest, our most euphonious singer, often compared to a flute.  It is definitely my favorite singer.  It is not doing well, nationwide, a victim of forest fragmentation (it needs big, uninterrupted, non-patchy forest) and cowbird parasitism.  Gary Hetel shared his cowbird research with us this morning, noting what has been termed "Mafia behavior" among them.  One question often raised by people studying cowbirds has been why little songbirds like the warblers, thrushes, and flycatchers would put up with a strange egg being laid  by a cowbird in their nest for them to raise.  (Cowbird chicks dominate such a nest, being precocious and quick-developing, starving the rightful chicks by taking all the food brought by the parents -- or even pushing the rightful chicks out of the nest, leading to their death.)  The new research concludes that some of these little songbirds have learned that if they DON'T raise the cowbird chick, the adult will return and actually destroy the nest!  Strong-arm (I mean strong-wing) tactics, indeed.  This new research surprises me.  I've wondered if they can always recognize the larger egg.  I've wondered whether they can even count.  In the course of all this wondering, I've seen several warbler nests which cowbirds laid an egg in, resulting in the little parents actually building a new nest over the one with the cowbird egg.  (Apparently the big egg is too cumbersome for them to just push out.)  I've actually seen one nest with three layers of nests, indicating  re-nesting to avoid having to raise the cowbird chick was a desperate priority.  This must be a tough decision, considering all the effort the act would take, and that it basically negates all the prior reproductive effort and energy.  The new research does not indicate what percentage of nests are built over and what percentage of nests experience Mafia Behavior.  In any case, our songbirds have enough of a problem just flying here.  Even if they have a successfully migration, they can still be decimated by cowbirds, once they try to breed.  Our rarest warbler in America, the Kirtland's warbler that breed in small Jackpine forest areas of Michigan, was on its way to extinction, as their world population numbered less than a thousand a short time ago.  Only two things have saved the species:  1.  intensely trapping and killing all the cowbirds that come into the breeding area; and 2.  setting fire to mature jackpine stands.  Smokey the Bear was not always right about trying to prevent all forest fires.  Many species require fires to regenerate growth.  In the case of the Kirtland's warbler,  this is a species that can make a nest only when very young jackpine growth is actually touching the ground.  The warbler nests under this cover.  Just as our mature pine stands get shaded and open, with little if any protective growth underneath, the jackpines that grew up to maturity, with total protection from natural forest fires, eventually proved insufficient to provide ground cover for this species.  The government runs tours through two protected areas, intensely monitored by ornithologists, in Mio and Grayling, Michigan.
 
Despite small numbers of birds today, partly because it got hot and sunny fast (a condition that normally slows activity down), and partly because we're nearing the end of the great migration, some good things were happening at the research station.  Namely Justin Dion and David Sheridan, two of our most promising young banders, taking over the banding operations.  They're probably about a year away from earning their federal permits.  But it all boiled down to the soldiers of the research team, who sacrifice a good night's sleep every day, and are willing to be opening the nets at 4:30 am:  Dr. Reich, Ken Dion, Keith MacAdams, and Mary Sharkey.         
 

5/31/08

Saturday, May 31:  YES!  A GREAT morning!  (though a short one).  Unbelievably we captured our fourth, fifth, and sixth MOURNING WARBLERS of the spring. It's intriguing to see how birds of a singular species often arrive in numbers together.  (There really is something to the old-timers' adage:  "birds of a feather flock together.") Usually we're lucky to capture a couple all year.  In addition, we captured our FOURTH GRAY-CHEEKED THRUSH of the spring. (One per year is typical.)  We're continuing to capture many second-year male warblers (especially American redstarts), confirming our suspicion that young males arrive later to the breeding grounds, with experienced, older males getting here earlier and reaping all the associated advantages, like first pick of choice territory and first opportunity to attract females.  We ended operations early as thunderstorms threatened.  We never want to jeopardize birds with hypothermia.  Winds tonight are absolutely perfect, from the South West, and of moderate to low speed.  This may be the last big push.  Sunday could be excellent.  Myrt Morin provided gourmet pastries for the banding team, once again spoiling all of us.  We've captured 875 birds up to this point.  With about two weeks to go, the thousand-bird barrier is appearing a possibility for us.  It would be our greatest spring record.  The birdbanding team presented Mattie VandenBoom, leaving us to birdband professionally beginning Monday, an IPOD loaded with all of the birdsongs of North America.  It will be a tool for her to attract some tricky species.  (She's one of the few members of our team who knows all the bird songs of our area.)  More than one tear was shed in the celebration. 

 
Mark Blazis 

5/30/08

GOOD MIGRATION DAY (unlike yesterday)!  Our  THIRD Mourning warbler! (female).  Black and white-warblers,  yellow-throats, Swainson's thrushes, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and Eastern wood-peewee were the main highlights.  Our pee-wee is a tough little bird, having flown here from somewhere between Panama down to Peru. They seem to prefer flying north mostly through the western islands of the Caribbean, willing to risk the potential hazards of flying long distances over water.  Another 6,000 mile round-tripper.  This neotropical migrant seems to have a preference for forests that are to some degree open underneath, and often with a good number of oak trees.  I'm not quite sure why these hardwoods appear to be so important to them.  Such was the case where we caught him today, just upstream of the rifle range.  I love the peewee's song , a sweet, clear, loud, easy-enough-that-even-a-rookie-can-identify:  "pee -o-wee!", given from high up in the canopy.  It's name is onomatopoetic.  Its scientific name, Contopus (short-foot) virens (green), doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  As I looked at his feet today, they looked pretty normal for a flycatcher, -- certainly nothing out of the ordinary -- and his coloration, if anything, is a GRAYISH-olive.  This is a good, easy bird to key out for the detective-bander.  You can't really mix him up, though, with any similar bird if you know the key features to compare are.  In this case, check out his two white wing bars, a yellow-orange lower mandible, (the dark gray phoebe has a bill that's all BLACK!); and a really obscure eye ring (Traill's/willow/alder flycatchers have an obvious whitish eyering).  If still in doubt, the wing cord length of the primary feathers is much longer than that of Traill's flycatchers.  As for the GREEN, forget it:  yellow-bellied flycatchers and Acadian flycatchers are much more greenish.  Although they're flycatchers, I've seen some individual peewees actually feed occasionally on some small berries.  While banding this particular individual this morning, we heard it twice loudly snap its bill -- a noise very few species outside the flycatcher family are capable of producing. 
 
Tomorrow looks 50/50, precipitation-wise.  If it's showering lightly, we'll give it a try, but we might wind up packing up early, or aborting entirely if it's going to be heavy for very long.  We've been the recipient of a lot of mornings much better than predicted this spring.  Keith should send out a communication to net-openers, regarding tomorrow's plans.  Be flexible and patient.  One thousand birds this spring is definitely within our grasp. 
 
Mark Blazis     

5/29/08

Thursday, May 29:  SLOW!!!!!!  As frenetic as yesterday's activity was, what with big numbers of migrants and several rarities, today allowed for a lot of rest and contemplation.  A few redstarts, a few yellowthroats, ...maybe a dozen migrants in all... and that was it.  The winds weren't generous last night, and it was quite breezy this morning.  But the migration is going to start slowing down now, anyway, and the easy pace of today was merciful to a team that's pretty exhausted from going almost non-stop since April.  (And remember much of our team was doing Cloud Forest birdbanding at the beginning of April, and Rainforest birdbanding in mid-April, down in Ecuador.)
 
  Probably the most interesting bird captured today was an Eastern Kingbird.  Not that that species is rare.  Far from it.  But it is fascinating from many points of view.  We saw THOUSANDS of them in April along the Napo River rainforest in Ecuador, as they were massing to migrate north from their wintering grounds down the Andes as far south as northern Argentina.  For whatever reason, they are exceedingly difficult to fool and capture in our nets. Luckily for us Keith MacAdams set up a canopy net near the trout pond where a pair nests each year. 
 
Tyranus tyranus (ruler ruler), is the scientific name of this big flycatcher that dominates flying insects around its throne/perch.  When it shows up, often around water, we hear its unique, electrical, sparking-like song (that's a politely generous term for its non-euphonious vocalization), and see its pathetic, shallow-wingbeat that gives the appearance of a very weak, poor-style-points flyer. That trait apparently inspired several studies on their flight speeds, which are relatively low, from around 13 to 21 miles per hour.   But somehow it makes the 6,000 mile round trip here every year, often doing a couple hundred miles each night.  Hunting-wise, they're like short stops, flying out from a perch and impressively catching flying insects in mid-air with their open bills.  They can even hover.  The two sexes are basically monomorphic, meaning they look pretty much alike.  In the hand, though, there's something to notice that a birdwatcher will never see: a primary feather pattern that is very surprising.  The very outermost feather on the wing, p-10 (primary #10), can have two different shapes, depending on sex.  If that feather's tip is very narrow and pointy, we've got a male; if it's not narrow and pointy at the tip, we've got a female.  Today, we caught a female.  Primary feather shapes with this much of a difference must have a benefit.  Although there appears to be nothing in the literature about it, I would bet heavily that the thin, pointy shape of the male's primary 10 feather is functional in communication, either in visual display or in auditory display.  Some birds use their wings to make sounds for communication.  Woodcock wings produce an incredible sound when the displaying male, starting from hundreds of feet high in the air, dives to the ground to sing/display on his lek.  The function of that male kingbird wing feather is deserving of future study to verify this speculation.  It was great to see Gary Hetel remembering this special wing feature for this species.  I knew he was going to be an Ahabish, monomaniacal bander when he started taking Pyle to bed and into the bathroom to read.  (Peter Pyle's indispensable, expensive, several-pound book, IDENTIFICATION GUIDE TO NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS, is every serious birdbander's Bible, 700 pages of numbers and measurements, graphs, charts, illustrations and esoteric data on anatomical minutia that are often critical for aging, sexing, and sometimes even identifying  tricky species.  It's nothing like a field guide.  If you're not a totally immersed birdbander, this book is a great cure for insomnia.  We know we've got a future professional when they ask someone to get them Pyle for Christmas.  Gary, keep taking it to bed!)
 
Mark Blazis
 
p.s.  Mary Sharkey, who has some of the best ears for birdsong on our team (along with Mattie VandenBoom), has been hearing yellow-bellied flycatchers this week in our net site.  This is a good sign, and we're likely to capture this much-anticipated species by the end of the week.

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5/28/08

What a great day!  Despite the fact that the winds were less than ideal (brisk and from the north west last night), we still had a smashing day of migration.  The urgency to fly north to breed obviously transcends less-than-perfect flying conditions for these little migrants.  Traill's flycatchers, Canada warblers (it was astounding to see Mattie VandenBoom differentiate between an adult female that we captured alongside an extremely similar young male making his first trip back here to breed:  he had only the slightest black showing on his face and his necklace was extremely subtle.  Next year, his female-looking necklace will be jet black and his facial markings will be black, too.) 
 
Mary Sharkey astutely noticed that we were catching a lot more second year male birds now compared to the beginning of the season in early May when the vast majority of the males were boldly marked adults that had made the journey north at least once before.  It's my contention, and our records support this -- that adult males that have already made the journey north to breed in previous years know the route and make it back here with great urgency and greater efficiency compared to the young males making their very first trip north to breed.  The older, experienced males know the route where they're going to re-establish their territories, often in the very same specific areas they had bred in the previous year (sometimes within a hundred yards of their previous nest site!).  Big numbers of young male common yellow throats and American redstarts have been the primary examples of this superiority/earlier arrival of older males, though we're seeing this same phenomenon with young male Canada warblers, as well.
 
Helen Blazis, advisor to Oxford's National Honor Society, brought that brilliant group of scholars to observe the banding research today.  They were rewarded with seeing Lyme disease tick extractions from the migrants, along with several brilliant jungle jewels, most notably female mourning warbler, gray-cheeked thrush, and great-crested flycatcher.  At first, some of the observers thought we had a Connecticut warbler.  This was most improbable.   Although we have captured this rare species on several occasions during the autumn migration, we had NEVER captured one in the spring.  In fact, only a handful of Connecticut warblers have EVER been seen on the East Coast in spring.  The entire species seems to migrate up the Mississippi River flyway on its way to the spruce-fir forest and bogs of Canada.  In the fall, they're keen to go back to Amazonia, and northwest winds bring them to the East Coast.  Our bird did have a grayish hood, but its throat was much too light for a female Connecticut, and there was a partial break in its white eyering, on the bill side.  In addition, its shape and posture were more upright/less horizontal.  Its legs were too short.  (Mourning warblers hop; Connecticut warblers tend to walk, one foot in front of the other, low.)  The "jizz", a British term for the overall impression a bird has was just not right.  We confirmed the identity of the species by noting its wing cord length was too small to be a Connecticut.  I really like Mary Sharkey's ornithological attitude.  She is very skeptical anytime anyone suggests the station might have an improbable rarity.  We HAVE to have that kind of critical skepticism.  We have no room for error.  If there's any question about the sex of a sexually monomorphic species, we always HAVE TO document it as SEX UNKNOWN.  The same goes for age.  
 
Helen, like a pied piper or Mary Poppins, led her group to the beaver dam, where they examined the construction and got totally soaked.  They now know beaver dams.  She also amazed most of them, capturing a very large, sunning male water snake (the tail length and shape from the cloacal opening to the tip is different in both sexes).  She also caught a huge male bullfrog for them to examine field marks to differentiate it from the similar, but smaller green frog.  It's great to see a woman that can one day go to the ballet and another day laugh in the mud with kids, snakes, and amphibians, at home in both the civilized world and the wild world.  Great role model for her girls.  (Although I think for sure that some of her male students were shocked that she'd dare to capture and hold that big water snake, a species that can have a nasty attitude as well as a nasty bite.) 
 
We captured another great-crested flycatcher, and most notably, Mattie VandenBoom brought in one of the two species she'll be banding this summer in the Montague sand plains, the brown thrasher!  I was proud to see her show everyone the naked skin under the breast feathers of this female.  This highly vascularized brood patch is wrinkled with blood vessels close to the skin surface, conducting body heat more efficiently to her eggs or young.  Males that don't sit on the nest don't have this naked skin under their breast feathers.  When you gently blow their breast feathers to the side, you will instead see that the male has flecks of downy feathers there, a major sexual distinction during the breeding season.  
 
We still haven't captured blackpoll warblers or yellow-bellied flycatchers.  Be on the lookout for them this week.  Temperatures are expected to warm up and go into the 70's. Numerous birds are already on their nests.  Robbins are already fledging young.  Fawns are being born and hidden in thick fern growth, dense low vegetation, and tall grasses.  (My friend Pete Picone, a great wildlife biologist from Connecticut was turkey hunting this week and reported to me the following:.  He sat totally still in the dark of pre-dawn.  As the sun came up, he noticed a newborn fawn, within arm's reach, that had been with him the whole time, unnoticed.  After photographing it, he stole away so as not to disturb it or its mother.  What an experience!)  Team-mates, get into the woods as much as you can now.   We don't have much more time before migration ends. 

5/27/08

I wish I could have been there.  YOU should have been there.  The Memorial Day weekend was one to remember, birdbanding wise.  Fortunately, our research team has so much depth, with Keith MacAdams, Gary Hetel, Mary Sharkey, and Mattie VandenBoom each capable of running the entire station and not missing any mid-week opportunities to capture the migration (as well as a farm team in training, our "Pawtucket.".  MOURNING WARBLER!  Now there's a special neotropical migrant.  This jungle jewel, emerald green, like the rainforest it came from, bright yellow, and black (from which it gets its lugubrious name) comes to our nets every year late in the spring migration.  I've found them wintering from Costa Rica and Panama south into Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, mostly in the highlands.  I've never birded Nicaragua, but I know they're well-reported there, in the winter, as well.  They just pass through Auburn, heading for the North, where I can usually find them way up in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, breeding in recent clearcuts, especially where there are a lot of raspberry plants, brush, shrubs, and young saplings.  We do have a very small number of breeding birds in higher-elevation western Massachusetts.    It's a gorgeous bird whose numbers have been going down for the last 25 or so years.  Mary Sharkey has an amazing photo of a fully mature male that I'll forward to you all.  
 
Today was iffy.  Fortunately we banded!  We were rewarded with TWO gray-cheeked thrushes, a rare migrant for us that we hope to catch late in May or early in June each year.  These special migrants came to us all the way from northern South America, especially eastern Ecuador (where we've caught them in the rainforest of the Napo), eastern Peru, Colombia Venezuela, north-west Brazil, and the Guianas.  They used a lot of fuel to fly the 3,000 miles to get here today.
 
We measured them VERY carefully, because there is a VERY closely related species, the Bicknell's thrush that looks almost identical.  Not long ago, the two birds were considered one species until it was determined that the Bicknell's breed solely in the North East on mountains that are over 4,000 feet. (Gray-cheeked's breed from eastern Canada to western Alaska!) For the Bicknell's, that's a pretty limited breeding range.  If we were to destroy the mountain top krummholz that they depend on (like building too many ski resorts), we'd probably lose this bird.  When we did the first Bicknell's population surveys, we'd climb the mountains (often camp out) and find none below 3,000 feet; we'd be hearing all the other thrushes below that elevation, with Swainson's thrush singing just before we'd get into Bicknell's habitat.  Then as we got towards the tree-lines, we'd start to hear them singing.  I associate their habitat with some of New England's most spectacular scenery.  Their song is significantly different from their cousins, the gray-cheeked, too.  (If you can hear them sing, identification is a cinch.)  And, of course, they don't interbreed.  They also winter only in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, unlike the Gray-cheeked's, which have a huge range.  The Bicknell's tail is a little more chestnut, and, in the hand, we can see a difference in both their wing formula (primary feather lengths) and overall size (they're slightly smaller).   It would be great to band a Bicknell's.  I've banded only two, when working with my great mentor, Strickland Wheelock.  I remember that day vividly.  It was early October.  The night before it SNOWED up in the White Mountains, and all the Bicknell's were forced out of the high elevations, and began their autumn migration.  I've NEVER had one in the spring, and it would be easy to confuse it with a nearly-identical Gray-cheeked thrush, so we always need to be meticulous in our measurements.
 
Today we also captured a second-year (2007 model) male American redstart.  It was like a pinto or African wild-dog, with all its patches of black just coming in.  Next year he'll have an immaculate black back and hood, salmon wing patches and salmon tail patches.  But this teen-ager has a way to go.  
 
Our great records-keeper, Keith MacAdams, has pointed out we're approaching 800 birds for the spring season.  This is an unheard of pace.  Strickland and I always thought the benchmark for a great YEAR was a thousand birds.  The fall season usually affords us even greater numbers, as the adult population is augmented by the young of the year.  If we break a thousand by mid-June, when we'll close up operations until August, it will be an incredible accomplishment of dedicated coverage.  The core team might look a little ragged (especially Gary Hetel), but it's because they've put in the time.  Ken Dion and Dr. Reich, opening nets at 4:30 am, have been crucial as well.  Everyone else who's working part-time on weekends is greatly appreciated as bull-pen relief.
 
It was good to have the Cape Cod Amazon Team once again join us this past weekend. They seem to always bring us good luck. Having been bitten by a rose-breasted grosbeak is THE initiation into serious banding, and I know some of you experienced that pain.  Only cardinals come close to the deep impressions left on a bander's fingers by these magnificent black, white, and rose birds from Central America and northern South America.  
 
The last and perhaps most striking capture of the weekend had to be the pair of scarlet tanagers.  Think velvet red on velvet black.  With proper light, you almost need sunglasses. They flew here from somewhere in the Andes.  Our good fortune.
 
Tomorrow, Helen Blazis will be leading the teaching/banding at the table with the Honor Society students from Oxford High School.  The annual event has proven very influential.  As a result of the banding experiences, one of her valedictorians actually chose wildlife biology as a major, specializing in, of course, BIRDS!  Ken Dion will open nets at 4:30 am with Mary and any other research team-mates who can help out.  I don't expect huge numbers, but I'm hoping for some late migrants like yellow-bellied flycatcher and black-poll warbler.  There is a possibility of that southern breeder, the Acadian flycatcher (a bad name, by the way:  Acadia is another name for Nova Scotia, and this species NEVER goes to Nova Scotia!), maybe a cuckoo.  We're always at the mercy of the winds the night before.  
 
Lastly, if any of you missed it, Mattie VandenBoom is now a professional birdbander (our first student bander, so honored), being hired to do research on prairie warblers and brown thrashers of the sand barrens in Montague.  Can you imagine being PAID four figures for banding migrants?  For me that's like being paid to sample chocolates.  What a great summer job, and so appropriate for a wildlife biology major at UMASS.  No one deserves the position more, considering her years of preparation, dedication, and dependability.  I remember her excitedly working with us as a rookie in the 7th grade.  But now, it's Mattie's time to fly.  We'll try to follow your flight. 

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To all my team-mates:
MAY 26: This is a date to remember! I am outrageously proud to announce that one of our most competent Auburn Birdbanding Research Team-mates, Mattie VandenBoom, a wildlife biology student at UMASS Amherst, and a product of our "farm team" developing student ornithologists, is our FIRST PROFESSIONAL BIRDBANDER! She was notified Monday that she has been selected as THE birdbander for a major research project on prairie warblers and brown thrashers! She'll be making several thousand (!) this summer along with room and board, as well, for doing what we all do, usually gratis: because we love it. Mattie is definitely a role model for all of us. An incredible position like hers is a possible opportunity for ALL of our students who go through our rigorous training program and attain their sub-permittee status. (It is also a possibility for our adult sub-permittees, too.) As a Master Bander, I get offered positions all over the world, every month, from New Guinea to Kenya; from Alaska to Australia to birdband. The work can be tough and challenging, as all of you know. In some areas you have to watch out for grizzly bears; in other areas, lions can be a concern. Snakes, mosquitoes, heat, humidity... sometimes ice and numb fingers. ALWAYS LONG, EARLY HOURS! But the rewards are invaluable: you always see incredible wildlife and meet some of the world's most knowledgeable wildlife biologists and field ornithologists. You make future professional contacts and get invited to participate in tangential opportunities. You generally are part of a published work, being written up in the credits of the dissertation abstract. It's not all glorious, of course. Food and lodging can be primitive (sometimes it's surprisingly sybaritic, though), but you come away from the experience with a lot of new knowledge that you can't buy or just read about. Anyone on our team wanting to follow in Mattie's impressive foot-steps can expect our assistance all along the way. Congratulations, Mattie! (I was going to say, since you're going to be paid now, YOU buy the coffee for us next time, -- but you and your mom usually bring it for all of us on the team anyway! -- Coffee's on us!) And as for all my wonderful adult sub-permittees, I'm DOUBLING your pay effective immediately!

Mark Blazis
5/22/08

WIWA, CAWA, EATO, SWTH, YWAR, VEER, NOWA, GRCA:  these are the four-letter alpha-codes of the major species banded today.  Wilson's warbler, Canada warbler, Eastern towhee, Swainson's thrush, yellow warbler, veery, northern waterthrush, gray catbird.  Just as professional ornithologists know genus and species in Latin for each species, there's a jargon among birdbanders, derived from the federal government's mandated computer abbreviations that we have to submit for our daily records.  When we say we've caught a COYE, for example,  everyone knows we've got a common yellow-throat.  Just to make certain that there is no mistake in our submission, the federal government also asks us to type in a four-number code, which corresponds to that species.  After a while, you even get to memorize those numbers (especially when you capture 400 gray catbirds each year -- by far our most frequently captured species).
 
Ten years ago, we had to submit all records to both the state and federal government agencies by hand.  If we made an error on a sheet, we had to write up the hundred-bird reporting sheet all over again.  We were VERY careful in presenting perfect-draft copies of our records (photo-copies not accepted).  No white-out was permitted, either.  It was very time-consuming.  Every set of my records had to be gone over by professionals in Laurel, Maryland, entry by entry.  I would get a report card every year.  The last five years in a row, the report card indicated zero errors on my part.  This was always very important.  There was always the implicit threat of losing one's permit if incompetent reporting was submitted.  Pressure.  -- Today, with the BANDIT program we use, we can have our submissions rejected as soon as we type them in, if our data is inconsistent with a species' known parameters.  That's a LOT easier, but mastering the nuances of the new computer program, (we've been kind of like guinea pigs with it), has proven a challenge.  We try to have many apprentices work on all aspects of birdbanding, including computer work, and that opens us up to mistakes.  It's critical our veterans remember to check our rookies for possible entry errors.  Fortunately, Dr. Reich, Keith MacAdams, Myrt Morin, and Mary Sharkey have spent a lot of time working the rough edges of the BANDIT program, and now it's proving more of an ally than an enemy.  High technology backgrounds are getting more critical in our work.  Every week, I receive research position offerings for birdbanding all over the world.  For someone like Sarah Reich or Mattie VandenBoom, these are adventurous opportunities that would complement your university work.  If you know your birds, know birdbanding, and can use a laptop and a GPS, you can almost pick and choose what part of the world you'd like to work in. 
 
Good news:  we're almost out of tick vials.  That means we're on a record pace finding more and more ticks on our migratory songbirds.  Yale School of Medicine was very happy today to hear that and will be sending us more vials. We're also out of alcohol to preserve the ticks.  Someone, really dedicated to the station, was going to bring in her Tanqueray to get us through till our next supply comes in.
 
It was great to have members of the Galapagos expedition team show up this week at the station.   
 
Winds are supposed to be tough on Friday.  Anytime they're much over 20 mph, it's a challenge to keep nets clean of falling debris and capture many birds.
 
The weekend should be better, and I suspect we're going to soon have a chance to capture our first blackpoll warblers, yellow-bellied flycatchers, and gray-cheeked thrushes.
 
I expect to be back on Tuesday, after opening up our Cape Cod home for the summer.  Meanwhile, the banding station is in absolutely great hands with Federal Sub-Permitees Keith MacAdams, Gary Hetel, Mary Sharkey, and Mattie VandenBoom in charge of all research and teaching duties.  Keith will send out daily reports, organizing the crew, and especially apprising all of our numbers for the year.  Good luck!   

5/21/08

Usually when J.J. White comes to the research station, he's all smiles and bringing good news or sustenance.  He didn't have that look this morning.  Today was not good.
 
He brought a nest of four dead, baby bluebirds, fatally pecked by invasive house sparrows that went into their nest box.  What's worse is that this is the SECOND nest this week to be destroyed by that invasive, alien species.  8 baby bluebirds won't be thrilling us this spring, and J.J. White looked devastated.  Much of his life is devoted to helping conserve that species.  He monitors hundreds of them every year, all over the state.  He's the Godfather of the bluebirds in our region, building nest boxes, monitoring their development, feeding them meal worms to get them over rough periods, eradicating their enemies, cleaning their boxes, banding them, and educating others to help the cause. 
 
The house sparrow shouldn't even be here.  Yet a lot of us inadvertently feed this bird and actually set up nest boxes for them to populate.  They are cavity nesters that will kill both tree swallows and bluebirds, two native species that are not able to defend themselves against this aggressive invader. 
 
The bird has been called the European sparrow or English sparrow because that's where the birds that originated our present population came from. (Prior to that, the original population came out of Africa.)   If you read about sparrows in the Bible, this is the bird they're talking about.  To be technical it's actually a weaver finch, and not a sparrow at all.  (Don't associate this "feathered rat" with our wonderful, harmless, native swamp, song, white-throated, Lincoln's, Savannah, and song sparrows.)  It has been very successful because of its parasitic relationship with humans, co-existing very will around our premises, especially during the winter, when it finds food and shelter.  Surprisingly, when Helen and I spent a weekend living with Roger Tory Peterson just before his death, he confided to us that he had actually developed a little bit of admiration for this deadly, destructive little interloper because of its improbable ability to survive and even thrive in habitat unnaturally altered by us humans.   
 
If you go back to 1850, eight pairs, brought from England, were introduced in Brooklyn, New York.  They didn't do well, so MORE birds were brought in in 1852.  A LOT more!  They were held captive to aid them in surviving our North East winter, and those that did were released in Greenwood Cemetery.  Another stocking took place in 1854 in Portland, Maine.  Around 1858, more were stocked in Peacedale, Rhode Island and Boston.  In 1867 another flock was released in New Haven.  (We humans can be a very persistent species.)  These birds flourished largely on the undigested seeds in horse dung, which proliferated on all the dirt roads at that time of our  pre-auto society.  They spread like wild fire with all this food, and soon were a pest in the seed/grain producing areas of the country.  By 1875, the pest was breeding all the way to the California coast and north into Canada.  A hundred million of them! It would be tough to find a town in North America without them.  mercifully, there is one place we don't find them:  untouched forest.  
 
Their nests are nothing like those of our native songbirds:  they're a big MESS of everything from straw and feathers to even fragments of plastic wrapping, all massed together in a big, roundish lump.   We'd find them every spring in the vents and ducts outside the school walls.  They're often filled with all kinds of pernicious little critters, indicative of poor housekeeping qualities. 
 
Because of their great and deadly impact on our more delicate native songbirds, the state permits their eradication 12 months a year.  If you see us trying to trap them, please understand we're doing this only to help our vulnerable little native American bluebirds and tree swallows survive.  A lot of well-intentioned, nature-loving Americans had good intentions releasing these birds, but even well-intentioned people can cause great harm when they act ignorantly.  If there's any hope for our wildlife, it's in educating our future generations. 
 
Mark Blazis   

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To all my team-mates:
 
A lot of birds got "ticked-off" by our team today (particularly veery's, northern waterthrushes, and brown thrashers). Deer ticks have been much more prevalent in our captures this spring of 2008 (possibly an ominous sign for more Lyme disease problems in the future).  Ixodes damini scapularis, the tick which we study because it is the vector of Lyme disease, is, in its larval stage, occurring now, EXTREMELY tiny.  If you don't know where to look for them (or how to look for them), you could easily miss their presence on a bird.  Dr. Reich visited us this morning, presenting me with an optical loupe, the same kind he uses in his delicate surgery etc.  What a difference that makes when a speck-of-pepper-sized tick is half-hidden under feathers near the blood-rich eye-ring or mouth-corner.  (Thanks, Dr. Reich!)
 
The brown thrasher is always an exciting capture.  Its bright YELLOW EYE (in an adult -- juvenile eyes lack this brightness) gives it a very intense appearance.  As a migrant, it's different from most of the birds we capture.  It winters entirely in the southern United States, and, unless it's behaving aberrantly, is going to be seen only east of the Rockies, summer or winter.  We're always intrigued by its unique song.  As one of our three mimics, it has a distinctive pattern, typically repeating an imitation of another bird twice; then repeating a different species' song twice, and so on.  If you can count to two, and hear one bird singing MANY different songs, you've found your brown thrasher.  (If you hear the same kind of imitation going on from a single bird, but the pattern is three or more same-phrases/notes repeated before the bird switches to another species imitation, you've got a mocking bird.  And if you hear imitations changing after only one utterance, you've got a catbird!  There it is:  one, two, three!)
 
Good numbers of magnolia warblers were captured as well today.  If there's a more spectacular jungle jewel in our forest, we want to see it. 
 
Mary Sharkey and Gary Hetel heard the great-crested fly catcher singing on territory at the rifle range this morning and succeeded in capturing it.  What a fabulous bird.  Its rough "PREEP!" is unmistakable to the trained ear.  Besides being just plain gorgeous, this bright, yellow-bellied, copper-tailed, gray-breasted, bushy-crested jungle jewel wintered somewhere between southern Mexico and Colombia.  It might well have watched Juan Valdez pick coffee or Jose Medellin supply plants to the secret jungle cocaine labs.  It loves big-tree habitat, where it can find cavities to nest in, and it's definitely not averse to nesting fairly close to human habitation.  (At our Cape Cod home, EVERY year, we have a pair nesting within 50 yards of our house.)
 
Our streak of uninterrupted-by-rain banding days is amazing, and, with continued luck, we may very well threaten the thousand-bird mark by the end of May.  Tomorrow may well have some brief showers, but we plan on banding through the lulls.
 
Still no black-poll warblers, one of our last jungle-birds to migrate; so we've obviously got a lot of birds still flying north.  Make sure you can identify yellow-bellied flycatcher, gray-cheeked thrush, and mourning warbler.  I expect we'll meet them in our nets in the next two weeks.  (For some strange reason, we've been regularly catching  the rare (in Massachusetts) yellow-breasted chats in late spring, as well) 
 
Mark Blazis         

5/20/08

South America was the big source of birds today.  Veery's from the Amazon.  From the Andes, Canada warblers, and American redstarts dominated our numbers.  The obnoxious high winds subsided, and our captures proportionately rose, as one would expect.  This was our biggest flight of redstarts in a long time.  (Redstarts are often an abundant migrant in our region in late May, so this was not altogether unexpected.)  There's something to the old adage that birds of a feather flock together.  Obviously, last night, big numbers of redstarts flew north, settling down here for the day to feed/refuel/ and rest for the next night's onward flight.  Some will actually stay to breed on the club property.  We attract a lot of redstarts in our research area because they prefer mature, deciduous forests, which are the main vegetative feature here.  (I wish we had a more diverse spectrum of all habitats, including some meadow/grassland/field, as well as more shrub/brush.  But that would mean some serious forest management, professional input, time, and money.)  Not everyone sees a lot of redstarts, so really appreciate them.  Go down to the Cape or coastal pine barrens, for example, where pines predominate, and you're not going to see anywhere near as many.  That's just not where they want to live.
 
Whenever I've been lucky enough to find one nesting, it's usually on a fairly low branch of a small tree, usually no more than about ten feet up and around a supporting fork.  When I used to collect old nests, I'd try to dissect some of them, and you could see how they were using strips of vegetation from grape vines, and grasses and weeds, and lichens and caterpillars' silk.  Imagine four eggs that are little more than half-an-inch long.  
 
If you watch them carefully, you'll see that sometime they'll behave like flycatchers, seizing a flying insect in the air; and sometime they'll act like typical warblers, diligently gleaning caterpillars and other arthropods from the foliage.  We can expect to enjoy them until broad-winged hawk migration time, in mid-September, when they'll all head back towards the Andes.  
 
What was great today was the opportunity to examine many redstarts of both sexes and ages.  The after-second-year, brilliant males (born in May or June of 2006 or before), with their black hoods and salmon tail and wing markings contrasted greatly with one-year old males (2007 models) that still looked basically like their Moms, betraying their sexual identity with only hints of black spotting on their otherwise female looking cheeks and necks, like-pre-pubescent boys.  Next year, those black spots will develop into the magnificent black hood and back, and the yellowish wing and tail markings will become vivid salmon-colored.   
 
Gentle west winds tonight should still be productive.  We'll try to band the rifle range habitat for as long as possible tomorrow morning.  Unfortunately, that area of the club has some of the best bird habitat in the entire 500 or so wild land, and our early closing to avoid conflict with target shooters often means our missing big numbers of migrants for our research.
 
Ticks taken from birds were mostly on veery's, swamp sparrows, and yellow throats.  Mattie VandenBoom did a great job on her first extractions.  (It would really help if we could acquire a surgical loupe-type instrument for the research station, as some of our delicate work would be greatly aided by good magnification.) 
 
Speaking of which, Marci Reich came down this morning, as she regularly does, sustaining the researchers with coffee, chocolate, cheese, snacks etc.  You might be interested in a behind-the-scenes look at her and some of the fiscal needs aspects of the research station.  She has been, of late, a Godmother/benefactor to the research station and its team.  The research station had been totally self-financed for most years of its work by Helen and me.  That's thousands of well-spent dollars over the years (especially for nets, which can cost close to a hundred dollars each).  Outside recognition of our work here, elsewhere in the United States, and in Amazonia resulted in some much needed grants.  But two people, working behind the scenes, have really come to the fore in a very quiet way, and should be recognized for their great impact on the station:  Myrt Morin (our web site person) and Marcy (grant Godmother/manager).  Their fund-raising efforts have been brilliant and have given us the freedom to expand in many directions, involving many more people in research and education.  Anyone wishing to join this support team would always be welcomed, and that can mean just keeping your eyes out for some useful equipment that someone is going to discard because they're upgrading.  We were talking this morning about future needs for the station, and, besides the perennial problem of net-replacement, we're definitely going to need a high-quality station lap top for record documentation for state and federal government purposes, as well as for our own records.  A first class dissecting scope for analysis of specimens taken in the field (especially ticks, lice, and some particular anatomical material.) is needed.  Special calipers for measuring bills (from tip to nare) and tails.  An additional scale.  Batteries.  An equipment box.  Several hundred pounds of bird seed.  An ipod and speaker for calling in target birds.  Fine manicuring scissors to help with net extractions and net repair; net-repair kits, optical loupe magnifiers, extremely fine tweezers for tick-removal, office-class copying capabilities to reproduce and hand out research materials in note-book form (especially the tabular information in PYLE, which is critical to our professional analysis of age and sex of difficult species) to critical members of the research team and/or teachers of apprentices; 10 ft. electrical conduit poles to set up nets;  -- there are other needs, but this is what the near future will require to continue to impact a thousand people a year, capture again over 2,000 birds in a single season, and maintain a level of professionalism in research and education that a hard working team has set as a standard.
 
Good winds for all of us.
 

5/19/08

WINDS!  In birdbanding, we live and die with them.  They were GOOD last night -- or so we thought! Even West winds will blow species our way as the birds fly north.   But TODAY, they were TERRIBLE!    I mean, what's with 25 mph winds shaking our nets (making them visible) and filling them with falling debris from the canopy (lots of catkins from willows and aspens)!  It was frustrating, knowing birds had flown in last night but weren't moving/feeding.  48 DEGREES!  -- Not much insect activity at that temperature means minimal feeding movement.  We didn't get shut out, mercifully, (Canada Warblers, American Redstarts -- both species originating in the Andes of South America) etc., but we were hearing MANY birds (including Great-crested Flycatchers at the rifle range, probably on territory) that just weren't moving.  The Great-crested Flycatcher, by the way, is a personal favorite:  gorgeous yellow-breasted with a warm brown back/head/crest and a very distinctive, rough "PREEP!" that you can't miss hearing.  I wasn't able to find his nest this morning, but I'm sure it's in one of the big trees with a woodpecker hole or other cavity that they build their nests in.  He flew her from his wintering grounds that span the territory from southern Mexico down to Colombia.  Where have you heard THAT geographical range before!  HUNDREDS of species that we think of as OUR birds spend half their lives (winters) in that part of Latin America.  It's CRITICAL habitat for them that we need to help safeguard.  When we lose land down there, we jeopardize OUR birds up here. 
 
If you had to miss a predicted good day, this was the one.  (We were BAD predictors today!)  High winds might be good for windmills and electricity production, but they botched up today everything from boating at the Cape (a lot of whale watchers undoubtedly got sea sick) to fly-casting for trout at the Club pond, and stripers off the coast, and birdbanding, of course.  Even the deer don't like high winds.  Under these conditions, they can't hear danger, with their sensitive ears.  They almost always just lay up and hide until the winds die down, relying mostly on their incredible sense of smell to help them keep "watch."  
 
Gary Hetel and Mary Sharkey nevertheless endured the rough conditions, hoping for that one bird (I HEARD a Mourning Warbler this morning at the Club, which would be one of our most special captures this season, by the rifle range nets, but, alas, it didn't fly into our nets!) that would make all the work worthwhile today.  We need the winds to die down for tomorrow, if we're to have any hope of big numbers in the nets.
 
By the way, one interesting, little bird that Mary and Gary netted yesterday, the diminutive field sparrow, is a bird we seldom capture.  Not that it's rare in this state -- it's just not one of OUR common birds because we don't have the FIELDS that it requires for habitat.  Our bet is that this species probably is going to be nesting in the weedy/grassy area around the wells of the town's water supply behind the gravel/sand dunes and railroad tracks.  (That area is LOADED with low-nesting birds.)  Its nest right now is probably on the ground, most likely at the base of a clump of weeds or tuft of grass.  If it can raise those young and start a second nest later in the season, (or if it starts a second nest because predators discover and destroy the first set of eggs) when things have grown up a little more, it will then change its preference for nesting, building it instead about knee-high in a shrub or small tree or bush.  As each week of our season advances, there are new dramas and complexities emerging.
 
Every one of the species we capture has something charming and/or fascinating about it (even those alien, invasive house sparrows that are pecking the eyes out of our nesting bluebirds and laying their eggs over the dead young that they've displaced), if we take the time and have the patience to observe them.  I hope you won't take ANY of our species for granted.  There's too much to learn from every one of them.  We were appalled this week when we heard a rookie callously say, ..."Oh, it's just a catbird."  (as if he really knew much about catbirds!)  As you might expect, that person doesn't know one percent of one percent of all the fascinating aspects of that species' intriguing behavior, varied vocalizations, and subtle body clues for aging and sexing.  Familiarity breeds contempt, and not just with birds, unfortunately.  We can tend to take for granted even wonderful team-mates, family members, ... even our own special life mates, if we're not careful.  Remind yourself  that every time you hold one of these jungle jewels, you're experiencing the privilege of an intimate encounter, an aesthetic and learning experience with one of nature's treasures: a moment of discovery and understanding that few other people will ever have.
 
Mark Blazis 

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Keith,
On behalf of the entire birdbanding research team, THANKS for giving up your entire vacation to help with this smashing week of banding.  You were a MONSTER,  at the nets, at the table, at teaching, and at the computer.
Could you please take over email communications next Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (I'll be banding Saturday morning, then leaving for Cape Cod with Helen for family matters.)  Please include total numbers of captures and recaptures.  I'm hoping we can get close to a thousand by June 10.
Thanks, Keith:  you are one of the irreplaceable, invaluable, totally dedicated members of this research team that makes it unique in the country.
Mark
 

To all my team-mates:

 
Sunday was magic.  A treasure of jungle jewels flew up on Saturday nights southerly winds!  Nearly two hundred people were present, a number augmented by the Auburn Sportsman's Club's fishermen, intent on catching huge, recently stocked trout at the club pond.  They brought their families with them, and the situation resulted in many people experiencing the excitement of seeing, feeling the heartbeat, -- and releasing a great number of jungle migrants. 
 
Not only were our numbers high, but the quality was exceptional as well.  We always capture neotropical migrants that breed in Massachusetts.  It's particularly exciting when we capture migrants passing through our state to breed farther north.  So besides all the warblers, like yellow throats, northern waterthrushes, American redstarts, blue-winged's, magnolias, etc., etc., the arrival of Wilson's warblers and Lincoln's sparrows was pure adrenaline for the banding team.
 
Wilson's warblers are green and yellow jungle jewels, possessing -- if they're male -- a black crown.  (That crown becomes larger and darker as they mature.  Females never develop much of a crown, so sexing them is quite easy this time of year.)  They're tiny:  about 9 grams.  It would take about 13 of them to equal the weight of a stick of butter.  Yet they fly two thousand miles to get here, all the way from southern Mexico down to Panama, their winter home.  (I don't understand why they tend not to cross the Panama Canal.)  I expect to see them on their breeding grounds during my short, annual trip to Maine, way up in the bogs, singing among the scattered tamaracks, dwarf spruces, and alders.
 
What a coincidence that another bird I expect to see in the same area of northern Maine, the Lincoln's sparrow, was captured along with the Wilson's.  The Lincoln's also loves those northern bogs, especially where there are willows.  The few nests of theirs that I've been lucky enough to discover have all been on the ground.  It's a bander's privilege to see the minute, sesame-seed size specks of black on their otherwise immaculate white throat.  Our birds could have flown here anywhere from Texas south through Costa Rica, their winter range.  They have a very subtle beauty.  Their fine streaking within their buffy breasts, their gray supercilium (eyebrow) and eye ring don't compare with many other jungle jewels, but they are definitely beautiful.  Though lacking the flash and pizzazz of the warblers, their natural tones are nevertheless very attractive (especially for a sparrow).
 
Probably the big lesson for the day resulted from an initial mis-identification of a thrush.  (There can be considerable variation in some of these birds.)  Initially identified as a Veery (an Amazon species, which we capture frequently), it was immediately apparent to several of us that the bird was actually a Swainson's thrush (a bird we find on our expeditions east of the Andes and in western Amazonia during the winter).  It had the characteristic buffy eye ring and "spectacles" of a Swainson's thrush, but, very importantly, also a primary feather pattern unique to its species.  Just as when you extend all the fingers of your hand and compare the relative lengths of those fingers (you'll notice your middle finger is longest; then either your index finger will be longer, shorter, or equal to your fourth finger etc.), the relative lengths of the primary feathers on a bird's wing often are helpfully diagnostic as to species, in this case, being quite different from other species of thrushes.  In spreading those nine primary feathers out and comparing them, we could see that primary feather #9 was longer than primary feather #6 AND  that primary feather #6 was NOT EMARGINATED (that is, the feathering on the narrow side of the main shaft was all equidistant from the shaft:  there were no indentations of the feathering).  If it were a VEERY, primary feather #6 WOULD HAVE BEEN EMARGINATED; and although primary feather #9 would also have been longer than #6, it would have been SHORTER THAN #7 (not the case in Swainson's Thrush).  Can you imagine all the thousands of hours of research/measuring that went into discovering all of these determinants?
 
For those who have been put on our email list just recently and want to review earlier records of this year's banding season, go to the research stations website (designed and kept up by our computer genius, Myrt Morin):  auburnbirdbanding.org. 
 
Hard to believe we're going to be given southerly winds Sunday and Monday nights!  That means Gary Hetel, Mary Sharkey, Ken Dion, and Lois Kolofsky won't be getting much rest this week.  Good thing Marci Reich keeps everyone going, supplying the high test coffee and chocolate.
 
Enjoy our last BIG week of migration.  It will gradually slow down and basically end around June 10, when all birds should be on their breeding territory.
 
Mark Blazis 
 

5/17/08

To all my team-mates:
 
From Cape Cod, a large contingent of students and surgeons who accompanied us to the Amazon this past April gambled that the dismal, rainy weather they left at dawn would eventually clear.  It did, resulting in a good day of mist-netting with a moderate number of expected neotropical migrant species being recorded (especially yellow-throats, northern waterthrushes, blue-winged warblers, pine warblers, warbling vireos, and veery's).  Still no huge wave, though.  Numerous birds from South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico were captured.  Considering the students had just returned from the Amazon themselves, they were quite impressed with the capture of veery's, which also had just come from that rainforest.  Two species were of particular interest:  a male American Redstart, and a "Trail's" flycatcher.
 
Let's consider the case of redstarts.  Significantly, in nature, many young males are killed by adult males of their species (lions and bears are typical mammalian examples).  Adult males are often intolerant of future competition.  To look like a female for as long as possible would appear to be an excellent survival strategy for a young male, given those dangerous possibilities.  And such is the case with many species... including our Redstart.  A young male will look almost exactly like an adult female for both his first year of life and the following year as well, with the exception of a few  hints/spotting of black on his head/hood, which by the following year will become solid black.  Without noticing these little specks of black, one might well assume the bird to be an adult female.  Consider a human parallel:  young boys not only LOOKING like young girls (no facial hair, no body hair); but also SOUNDING like girls, with high-pitched, pre-puberty voices.
 
Traill's flycatcher is actually a catch-all term for two almost indistinguishable species, Willow and Alder flycatcher, which look almost exactly alike.  If we could HEAR them sing, our identification problem would be easy, as their songs are much different to the trained ear.  We needed to look at the primary feathers on the wing.  Specifically the feathering on the narrow side of the shafts.  Some of the feathers can be the same parallel width, extending outwardly from the shaft, or they can have an extensive indentation.  We needed to look at primary feather #6 and notice that it had no "emargination" to determine it was not a Least flycatcher.  We were left with only one other possibility, a choice between Alder and Willow.  There were no further definitive clues that we could use to make such a determination, so we were forced to lump it into the all-encompassing "Traill's" designation.
 
The students examined breeding female brood patches, which were highly vascularized and wrinkled, with blood vessels close to the surface of the naked breast skin, transmitting maximum body heat to eggs and young.  They also so cloacal protuberances that were like little volcanoes, indicating males that were laden with sperm, ready to mate.  
 
Students were bitten by cardinals and pecked by red-bellied woodpeckers (a poor name, considering there is very little red on that part of their anatomy, and there are several other features which ARE very distinctive, and much more worthy of a descriptive name).  Students also noticed the difference of toes on woodpeckers compared to the toes on other songbirds:  most songbirds have three toes in front and one in back:  woodpeckers have two in front and two in back, giving them added support in climbing vertical trunks.   
 
As for ticks, today was a banner day. We collected  numerous ticks from birds of the shrub/brush habitat (yellow-throats had the most ticks).  We never get a tick from a bird that exclusively haunts the canopy.  All of these specimens for our Lyme disease study  are sent to our research partners at the Yale School of Medicine for DNA analysis.  It was great to see Sarah Reich, just back from Cornell, working with Mattie VandenBoom, back from UMASS, delicately extracting the ticks from the skin around the birds' eyes and mouth corners, along with surgeons Dr. Daniel Gorin and Dr. Edward Cantwell, both of whom displayed a much-expected precision in their handling of the birds.  What I noticed with these surgeons that is dramatically different from most people who do work on ticks with us is their decisiveness and efficiency in performing operations.  Their skills definitely transfer to this kind of research work.  
 
Keith MacAdams and Mary Sharkey directed net operations, as Gary Hetel was proudly attending his daughter Emily's graduation  from Assumption (Great Job!) and Helen Blazis was raising student scholarship money with Garden Club sales on Grafton Common.  (Bravo!)  
 
Winds have still not been what we need for the big wave.  Oh for 75 degrees and southwest winds over night -- SOON!  We've only got another week or so of prime migration time.  
 
Mark Blazis 

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5/15/08

To all my team-mates:
 
The exit of the dreadful storm/bad winds was like a cork popping out of a bottle.  The last two days have had good numbers of migrants, despite winds not being optimum.  Wednesday was good, especially considering the ten inner-city kids who were mesmerized by birds in their hand to release.  For most of them, this was the first time in their lives they made contact with a wild creature.  Russ Anderson, their environmentally inspired teacher, is opening up a new world for them, taking advantage of this resource.
 
Today, Thursday, was cool and cloudy, with showers prematurely ending the day's banding in late morning.  But we had constant activity throughout the banding period.  Keith MacAdams, Gary Hetel, Mary Sharkey, Ken Dion, Lois Kolofsky, and Joan Sharkey worked the station, capturing good numbers of red-eyed vireos, yellow-throats, warbling vireos,  and orioles, among other species. 
 
The capture of several red-eyed vireos was of interest and brings up the important concern with our carefully examining and learning eye color and how it affects our ability to age particular species.  Red-eyed vireos are found wintering all the way down the northern two-thirds of South America east of the Andes.  The birds we captured today likely flew an incredible three or four thousand miles for the privilege of breeding  in our forests, and eating our abundant, high-protein/high-fat caterpillars (perfect for feeding their young). It's thought that there is a resident, non-migratory population of red-eyed vireos down there in South America, virtually indistinguishable in the field from our breeding bird, that is a totally different species from our North American breeding birds.  Red-eyed's have a huge breeding range in North America.  They may be the most abundant bird of the eastern deciduous forest.  You can't miss them once you learn their incessant, monotonously repetitive song:  "Here I am...Where are you?...Here I am... Where are you.?"  often repeated over a thousand times per day.  This is one beautiful bird that we don't have much to worry about, in terms of danger to it by virtue of habitat destruction because it is so widespread.  They like canopy, though, where we hear it all day long, singing in May; so it always surprises me when we capture them in our low, 8 ft. high nets.  The adult birds are well-named, and it was advantageous for all of our banders to see the rich, ruby-red eye, which will serve as a standard of comparison for the hatching-year birds, born later this year, that can be tough to age in August and September.  (Those young birds will have a much-less-rich-red eye, and it sure helps if you've seen/absorbed this standard of intensity of color.)  Like many species we capture (like gray catbirds and several species of sparrows, for example), eye color gets richer and deeper as the bird ages.  The rich dark eyes of the adult catbirds captured now will similarly be much different from the murky/muddy eyes of the juveniles later observed this summer and early fall.  We need to carefully look at the eyes of a lot of species for accurate aging, especially during fall migration.  Many species of sparrows will present this same challenge, and even first-time visitors to the research station who have perfect color vision can be of assistance in aging tricky birds.
 
Once again, we found the importance of analyzing the primary wing coverts, which in these adults were truncated (flattish-tipped, rather than arrow-pointy),   with  obvious, light edging.  You've got to learn bird anatomy and know what feathers to specifically look at to get all the information we need.
 
Speaking of which, Eastern Kingbirds, which we observed by the thousands in Ecuador this past April during our research there, as they were massing in Amazonia to migrate north from their wintering grounds in Argentina, are singing all around the Auburn Sportsman's Club trout pond.  Bird watchers never see one interesting feature on them:  the sexually dimorphic difference in their primary feathers.  The male has indentations in those flight feathers that are very different from the wing feathers of the female, and we can only speculate that they help produce a signal to other Kingbirds, perhaps subtly auditory, like the wing-sounds from a woodcock (but far less obvious), helpful either in mate acquisition or territorial display.
 
We caught many yellow throats the last two days and we analyzed them carefully.  The moment was a great time to make an important distinction.  We're anticipating the eventual capture of a species we've not yet banded at the station, but should be ready for:  the orange-crowned warbler (most often seen along the coast during autumn migration, but coming down from Canada and definitely passing through our region).  We could get one this spring (more likely in September/October), and it would be a shame if we missed it because we confused it with a juvenile common yellowthroat.  1.  It will have DARK legs (as opposed to light legs that yellow throats have), as Gary Hetel points out.  2.  It will have SUBTLE, BLURRY STREAKING down its breast; 3.  a subtle eye-line. 4.  It will NOT have a faint, yellow throat.   Forget about seeing the orange crown, or even needing to see it for the identification.  
 
We're already over 400 captures, thanks to the dedication of our core research team.  With any luck with the weather, we should surpass the thousand mark when we around the tenth of June.  (At that point, all of our migrants will have passed through and be on their breeding grounds.)
 
Try not to miss the next ten days of migrations and all the lessons they afford.
 
Mark Blazis

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5/13/08

Birdbanding: Tuesday, May 13:
 
ZERO!  Even God rested on the 7th day.  With wrong-direction East, North East winds blowing heavily all night , and hardly diminishing this morning, the birdbanding team wisely slept in, conserving energy for Wednesday, which, with any luck, could be a massive migration day.   Considering the migration has been bottled up for two straight days by the huge storm to our south, (it has effectively blocked the big flow of migrants here), the bottle is ready to burst one day this week.  If we have the predicted big shift in wind direction and mitigation of wind speeds, Wednesday or Thursday could be one of the big waves of the spring migration.  In any event, try to get out Wednesday or Thursday if at all possible to catch the potential big wave.
 
Mark Blazis

5/12/08

To all my team-mates:
 
Monday, the perfect day for a BAD/BLAH (our first) day of birdbanding this May.  But what can you expect when the winds gust to 26 mph (shaking capture nets and making them visible) and come out of the East/North East (the WORST direction possible for migrants coming from the South! -- nobody is migrating here from far out on the Atlantic Ocean!), we tend to have our poorest days at the research station, and to no one's surprise, today was no exception.  Poor Keith MacAdams, wet from the start, opening the nets at dawn and submerging up to his waist at the infernal beaver dam that is jeopardizing our net sets as waters rise -- admirably continued the rest of the day with Mary Sharkey and Gary Hetel.  Our numbers were about 15% of what we should get on a good day with previous-night winds from the South/South West.  At least Keith got some new net positions ready, especially the high, canopy net that will take species that forage high up in the trees and almost always avoid our low nets.  There are so many warblers that require high nets (ceruleans, Blackburnian etc.) because of their typical high-feeding behaviors, that we really need canopy nets to get any serious, extensive, non-accidental data from them. 
 
At least the ruby crowned kinglets and indigo buntings came in.  The little ruby-crowned's (only hummingbirds are smaller) have wintered as far south as Mexico and Guatemala.  Most of them are passing through now, looking for the coniferous or mixed coniferous/deciduous forests of the North to breed (you can see them nesting from Alaska all the way across Canada, up to wherever the treeline ends and the tundra begins.) 
 
Now the Indigo bunting is always a show-stopper, (you almost need sunglasses to look at it on a bright day!) with an electric blue plumage that the painter/printer just can't do justice to in a field guide.  It has an OOH!-AAHH!  iridescence that radiates when the sun hits it.  (Can you tell we REALLY like this bird?)  They're coming here all the way from the Caribbean, and southern Mexico down to Panama.  (It never ceases to amaze me that so many species stop their winter migration just short of entering Colombia and the rest of northern South America -- like there's a natural stop sign down there, just a chip-shot beyond the Panama Canal.)  What's the reason that a lot of other species, very similar in so many morphological features, don't see this "stop sign" and continue  down the Andes or into Amazonia? --(like red-eyed vireos, yellow warblers, Blackburnian warblers, Blackpoll warblers, Cerulean warblers, American Redstarts, Northern Waterthrushes, Veery's, Swainson's and Gray-cheeked Thrushes?  This continues to be an intriguing mystery to me and ornithologists who revel in these puzzles.  (Our last warbler to go extinct, probably sometime around 1970, the Bachman's warbler, died out because it could ONLY winter in Cuba!!!!!!!  -- In life, the more flexible you can be, the easier it is to survive.) 
 
The next ten or so days are historically the best banding days of the year.  We've got some friends who have thus far not been able to enjoy the great migration, but don't despair:  the best is yet to come. 
 
The forecast for the next week is for periods of showers (we've done well with that forecast so far, early this May), with Wednesday looking like a possible monster day, -- a big break of sun --;   and Thursday is looking potentially decent.  We've been fooled badly once this spring (to our benefit), so hopefully some of those showery days won't have the East/North East wind curse that they brought today.  But even on this bad day, we caught a couple jungle jewels. 
 
Mark Blazis

5/11/07

Happy Mother's Day, to all who are entitled to the honor!  And it was a happy Mother's Day morning for the research team and its guests.  In what has been an unprecedented week of continuous good luck and good flights, we ended with another surge.  Lincoln's sparrow, with its pepper-spotted white throat, passed through on its way to the tamaracks/spruce bogs up in Maine or Canada.  They won't breed here, but they regularly stop at the Auburn Sportsman's Club to refuel.  Additionally, seven yellow-throats were the number-one capture species of the day, surpassing by one our tally of gray catbirds.  By the way, this habitat is PERFECT gray catbird habitat:  we regularly catch several HUNDRED each year (perennially leading our list of captured species).  We've recaptured a good number of individual catbirds SEVEN YEARS IN A ROW:  an improbable statistic, considering the hazzards of storms, raptors and other predators (especially feral cats).  The classic Wisconsin study concluded that in that state alone, each year 17 to 30 MILLION song birds are killed by house cats.  From that data, it's estimated that our country loses anywhere from 100 to 300 MILLION song birds each year to house cats,.  This is an unnatural, totally-human-introduced predator that surely is taking its toll on the population of neotropical migrants, which have enough trouble surviving their perilous journey.  When we consider their declining numbers, we can look to house cats as one major contributing factor.  (One Audubon Society hero in California took it upon himself to kill a wild house cat that was decimating the shorebirds in his area AND WAS ARRESTED for his actions, facing jail and fines.   
 
Ovenbirds, blue-winged warblers, black-and-white warblers dominated our neotropical migrant capture numbers, along with Baltimore orioles.  This next week is my favorite of the year for spring migrants:  it is the week we expect the gorgeous, much-anticipated and seldom-seen Baybreasted and Cape May warblers .  They're headed to their preferred spruce-fir forests of the far North to breed, but will stop over here to fuel up on our abundant caterpillars.  Remember they always migrate at night, feeding and resting during the day.  Their numbers have been low, probably a result, at least in part, of their preference for spruce budworm larvae.  Commercial forestry practices up north, including cutting and spraying to kill the budworms have greatly disrupted the cycle of the big budworm eruptions in populations, (spruce budworms may be great for these warblers, but they cut into the profits of the timber industry) cutting down the populations of these jungle jewels.  A capture of either of these colorful species, as well as the drab, nearly mythical (considering its rarity) orange-crowned warbler would be a cause for major celebration at the research station.  We have NEVER captured the Bay-breasted or Orange-crowned warblers in spring, and Cape Mays only a handful of times.  
 
Today was spectacular in terms of our educational goals (which often are far more important than our research):  besides the perfect weather, over fifty people visited the station:  from 6-year olds to an octogenarian; and even the Westboro Garden Club.  Myrt Morin and Dr. Reich, our computer geniuses, have conquered the problems presented by the flawed, not-user-friendly new computer program (BANDIT) mandated by the federal Birdbanding Labratory.  Noteworthy:  Auburn Junior, David Sheridan, has tirelessly continued his apprentice progress to the point that next winter, we will apply to the federal government, on his behalf, for his personal federal birdbanding permit.  (He's worked five years to get this far!)  In addition, it was great to see our School Committee Chairman, Janie Bouges, working side-by-side with the students, taking over the documentation of records.
 
In the blood/sweat/ and tears department, Keith MacAdams cut new lanes and set up new net locations that we hope will add to the productivity of the station.  Setting up a new net site is a chess game; you're trying to anticipate where birds are going to be moving during their morning feeding activity.  We've been, thanks to a lot of experience, very successful in our guesses in recent years, but we still make some surprising mistakes.  Our problem at the Sportsman's Club is that much of the habitat is mature forest.  This means that in those areas, primarily shaded, there is little dense, low undergrowth.  Our nets are all about 8 feet high, hardly reaching near the canopy.  We are always most successful when we can find a location of low, dense vegetation, preferably near water, where arthropod activity is high, attracting hungry migrants.  If we can place the nets, additionally, with an orientation that keeps them out of the sun (so they won't be visible) and out of the wind ( so the birds won't detect their movement), we usually have a winning piece of real estate.  Location, location, location.
 
Mark Blazis   

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5/10/08

To all my team-mates:
 
I was TOTALLLY WRONG!  The weather forecast was supposed to be brutal: East/North East/North winds and torrential rain last night.  I wasn't expecting an even mediocre day.  But it never rained inland as hard as forecast, and the 30 mph winds never materialized. We had an EXCEPTIONAL day.  This was fortunate, as we had a large number of visiting guests, including students from the April Amazon team, which had driven down all the way from Cape Cod, arriving by about 7 am, in time for our first release of captured birds.  This time of year, capturing 40 or so birds, if conditions are at all decent, is par for the course.  Anything over that starts to get good.  At last count, we were around 50 birds.  
 
Highlights included woodthrush, unequivocably the most beautiful singer of the eastern mixed deciduous forest (it is a bird that is diminishing in numbers:  the Robinson study in Illinois has documented a 90% decline in numbers due to development and fragmentation of wild habitat.  If you go into farmland in Illinois, you may be shocked at how much has been converted to corn production, with little forest left standing.  These birds don't do well with just edges remaining; the cowbirds find their nests easily under those conditions, parasitize their nests, and wipe out their populations.)  Every woodthrush we capture and release is a cause for joy.  This bird wintered either in Mexico or Central America, down to about the Panama Canal.
 
Warblers were in surprisingly good numbers, with our capturing of our first Nashville warbler of the season being a highlight.  You could see the young male's reddish cap ostentatiously standing out.  Its bright yellow breast and bright white eye rings make for a spectacular jungle jewel. Here's another species that favors Mexico in the winter, but ranges as far south as Guatamala.
 
Orioles were also captured, and their wintering grounds were anywhere from Cuba and Mexico down to Colombia and Venezuela.  Yellow-throats (which coincidentally occur in pretty much the same wintering grounds as the orioles) and black-and-white warblers were moving in good numbers.  Those little "zebra" birds, as one young student labeled them in awe, also prefer that same winter range, but fly farther down the Andes into Ecuador and Peru. 
 
One lesson from these and other neotropical migrants we captured today:  "OUR"  birds require for their continued existance, not only conservation of wild land up here in North America, but also conservation of wildland in Mexico, the Carribean, Central America and South America.  For these birds to continue this phenomenal migration in future generations, there will have to be dedication to the protection of the remaining wild lands not only here, but in the lands of our southern neighbors.  This is troublesome because of economic issues that we have no control over in those countries.  It's a great benefit to us and "our" birds when organizations and individuals buy/safeguard wintering habitat in the neotropics, while that land is still relatively inexpensive.  Any conservation organization that is buying land to preserve it forever is doing the most for wildlife and deserves our support.  In some cases, those vulnerable wintering grounds are MORE crucial to their survival than is some of our vast breeding grounds here in North America.
 
It was great to see Keith Macadams taking over the research table for the actual processing of birds.  Usually he's out there in the swamp taking birds out of the nets, and handling problems with water and beavers.  His handling of these 10-gram jungle jewels was flawless, and he once again demonstrated what a fine teacher he is.  Matti Vandenboom was back again from her wildlife biology studies at UMASS, do everything at the station, including teaching birdsong of the species that we captured.  Helen Blazis was in her natural niche, explaining the subtleties of identification and making sure all our apprentices got plenty of hands-on training.  It was great to see them and Mary Sharkey, Gary Hetel, Janie and Abbey Bouges, and David Sheridan showing the large number of flyfishermen at the club each of the captures before we released them.  You could see the members took pride in knowing their club was a valuable link in the migratory route these special birds are traveling through.
 
MOTHER'S DAY:  Tomorrow morning, we'll be birdbanding.  The weather should be even better.  The next dozen or so days -- any of them-- are capable, with the right wind conditions at night, of producing the magical hundred-bird banding day.  If you think your mother would find it a treat to join us tomorrow, by all means invite her and bring her along.
 
Mark Blazis
 
p.s.  I don't have 100% faith anymore in weather forecasts.  You NEVER know what life is going to bring until you live it.   

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5/9/08

To all my team-mates:
 
The winds changed last night.  When I walked out the door at dawn this morning, the amount of bird song had diminished much from the three previous mornings.  The only migrant clearly singing was a northern parula.  I knew numbers would be down immediately. 
 
Fortunately, the winds hadn't totally shifted yet to the East/North East.  (They will tonight!).  Today was not without its rewards.  Gary and Mary (and Ken for a short time:  unfortunately he had to work at the Fire Station today) opened early, as usual.  Today was the day for Fly catchers.  An important lesson for all:  look at the wing morphology of this family of birds to help you identify them.  You must know that each species of bird has a primary feather pattern (we're talking about the relative lengths of each of the primary feathers).  It's like a hand print.  If you look at your hand, your fifth finger is shortest; your fourth finger is shorter than your middle finger; and your index finger is shorter than your middle finger.  (Check whether your index and fourth fingers differ or are equal; there is a significant difference between our two sexes of humans, in this characteristic, in general, though there are exceptions.)  This is what we have to do to help identify fly catchers.  We spread the primary wing feathers open like the fingers of a hand and check out their lengths and shapes. 
 
Tricky banding lesson for our advanced banders:  Each primary feather on the wing is numbered:  the outer-most primary feather on the wing being number 10.  As you move inward, you come to 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 etc.  We had a mystery bird.  We needed to actually look at the length and SHAPE of these individual wing feathers (NOT COLOR OR PATTERN! -- as you would ordinarily expect!)  We were trying to determine whether this particular bird was a Least flycatcher (our smallest); or a Willow or Alder flycatcher, which look IDENTICAL!  (If you hear them sing, they're easy to distinguish.  They also breed in different habitats; but on migration, they travel together and it's a major headache sometime to distinguish them.  90+% of the time, we can't!  They are so close in terms of having split on the family tree in evolutionary time that without hearing them sing or seeing them in their breeding territory habitat, it's almost impossible to determine their exact species, so we lump them into one double-species grouping:  TRAILL'S FLYCATCHER.  But to determine they weren't Least Flycatchers, we looked at primary feather #6.  (This is just like detective work/forensic work).  If you look at any primary feather, it has a shaft, with barbs sticking out on both sides.  The barbs can be all the same length, so the feather edge runs parallel to the shaft.  Or it can be EMARGINATED, with a slight indentation of the edge silouhette.  On a Least, primary #6 is EMARGINATED.  Our mystery bird was not, so it was determined accurately to be a Traill's Flycatcher.
 
SATURDAY PREDICTIONS:  We're supposed to have BIG tides at the Cape, North East winds 30 to 50 mph.  BAD!  Inland, conditions will be mitigated, but still far from ideal.  The only good part of the prediction is that the rains should be over by dawn, so we can proceed with banding.  As for variety and numbers of migrants, one would expect them to be relatively low, considering they're not going to blown here from over the ocean.  Remember, we ideally want South/South East winds to bring migrating birds up from the Tropics;  in September, we'll look forward to North West winds to conversely bring birds down this way from the North.  I would LOVE to be wrong with this prediction!  Let's see what happens.  One great bird can make the morning worth while.  In any case, you'll be with some of the top bird banding minds in the region.  
 
We'll have one complication tomorrow; the fishermen at the Club are having a fishing derby and will not appreciate any interference with their fishing, so please stay away from them and the pond area. 
 
Let's see what we net!
 
Mark Blazis
 
p.s.  Keith will be wanting to set up some additional nets tomorrow and will be able to use as much help as possible EARLY.  -- even if it's raining.     

 

5/8/08

To all my team-mates:
 
Today it happened:  THE HUMMINGBIRDS ARE BACK!  We always expect them sometime during the first week in May.  Get your sugar water mixed and set out to your feeders now!  It was exciting to capture Ruby-throated Hummingbirds in the mist, which seems to make them quite active. 
 
We were a little concerned about the weather today.  We had light sprinkles much of the morning.  But those conditions are often exceptional, as long as they  aren't accompanied by East or North East winds, which carry birds AWAY from us in migration.  For three straight nights, winds have either had a southerly or westerly component, bringing large numbers of migrants to our research station.  Mary Sharkey took out her FIRST hummingbird:  a landmark event for a bander.  (We never let anyone handle such a delicate bird without several years of previous experience.)  Mary, Lois Kolofsky, Ken Dion, and Gary Hetel ran the station.
 
Warblers were the primary captures this morning:  black--and-whites, yellow's, blue-winged's, northern waterthrushes, yellow-throats, and American redstarts (among others.).   Orioles have been in already, but today was our first capture date.  Interestingly, we've been hearing and seeing many Parulas, but have yet to band any.  Species that are primarily canopy dwellers are less frequently captured in our nets.
 
Our tick studies have been producing a good number of specimens from birds of low, shrub/brush habitat.  This morning, several yellow-throats had the grain-of-pepper-sized nymphs around their eyes and under their bills.   
 
We are guessing that Friday could be a washout.  (We won't really know until dawn.)  Saturday could be very good, though we won't be able to set up the nets pre-dawn if it's raining heavily.  The precipitation is expected to end early (keep an eye on the forecast for Auburn), after which there could be an explosion of captures.  Our peak capture dates are usually from May 10 to May 22 or so.  Many springs we're handicapped by rain, which can sabotage us for many days and diminish our numbers.  Sunday looks good, but the following week could go either way.
 
One tip on photography:  we need to document photographically a good part of our research, and the use of digital cameras has started to dominate.  A pro photographer joined us today and helped us eliminate a problem of flash wiping out/making too bright some of our macro shots.  Simply, using the macro setting, powering up the telephoto to 3X power, we were able to place the camera far enough away from the subject (using a BLUE, soft, absorptive cloth background), and get tack-sharp, color-perfect exposures.
 
The breeched beaver dam has seriously lowered the upstream marsh/pond, greatly benefitting our net sites.
 
Mark Blazis 
 

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5-7-08

 
To all my team-mates,
 
The Tropics are emptying out!  The migrants are arriving!  For the second day in a row, a HUGE wave of neotropical migrants passed through our region. Night-time flying conditions have been perfect.  This is bad news for a lot of forest-munching caterpillars!  (We are thus far avoiding East and North East winds, the bane of the migration).   As I walked out my door in Grafton this morning, I heard five species of warbler singing all around us, the greatest numbers being parulas and black-throated greens.  Baltimore orioles joined the chorus.  I knew we would have another big day banding. 
 
And so it was.  Black-throated blue warblers, magnolias, yellow-throats, northern waterthrushes, veery's, towhees, blue winged warblers, myrtle warblers, etc., etc.  This is THE time to be in the field.  (I heard warbling vireos and yellow warblers, but they evaded our nets.)   
 
Educational accomplishments:  What made the day most spectacular and indelibly memorable was the presence of a class of minority students from the city (mostly 15-year-olds), headed by a former colleague, Russ Anderson, who is trying to run an environmental program for these nature-starved children.  To share our passion with those kids who would never experience anything like this was a great privilege.  One walked on a beaver dam for the first time, getting soaked up to his waist.  They all released multiple migrants after processing.  And they wanted to come back!  We affect a lot of suburban populations, but to get into the hard hard core of the city and  to spark a totally new interest in those deprived kids was as good as it gets.  With great regret, I lament the inability of Auburn students to come during the week because of a complete focus on passing MCAS tests.  This is a perennial problem for them; I don't see them ever being able to get out of school for special events like the migration, as long as that narrow focus continues to be mandated.  Whoever set up the MCAS test schedule was no ornithologist, wildlife biologist, or naturalist.  (Why couldn't they test in early June?)  Although those kids will miss Spring, you don't have to, considering what's possible this weekend.
 
Gary Hetel, Mary Sharkey, and Ken Dion were once again magnificent in their work at the nets and their work with the kids.  Mary, driving up every morning from Connecticut to assist us, has proven herself a very special friend and dedicated researcher and teacher.  It's a killer for all of us that we can't take you all out of school or work during the week when conditions are bursting.    
 
Friday looks like a rainout.  (Some of the research team deserves a little sleep, anyway.)  But that could be great for us on the weekend.  Fronts like this frequently stop, temporarily, the flow of birds flying north, and when the flights resume, they're often like the bursting of a dam, with potentially