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J.J.'s Bluebirds
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.
Back to Main Page
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.
Back to Main Page
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.
Back to Main Page
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
Back to the top
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back to the top
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
Back to the top
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