FOS: Northern Flicker

CAPTAIN SAM'S

It was a kind of a hectic day of banding today with 54 new birds and 25 recaptures of 10 different species.  I was expecting another windy morning but surprisingly it was rather calm for the first 2 hours.  As a result, I captured 29 birds during that time. The wind picked up around 8:15am and a line of rain associated with the cold front that was moving through our area was heading my way.  I decided to close the nets and call it a day.  After closing most of the nets, I checked the radar again and noticed that as the rain approached the coast it dissipated, so I left a handful of nets close to the banding open.  Around 10:30am the threat of rain was gone and the wind had died down again so I opened up all the nets again.  It started to get windy again around 1:00pm so I shut everything down for good and went home.

The highlight of the day was a first-of-the-season Northern Flicker.  Flickers have been present at the banding station for weeks now but this one decided to fly low enough to get caught in the net.  I feel bad that the rest of the banding crew missed out on this one and I was the only one there today to enjoy it.

The Northern Flicker that I banded today was a second-year (SY) female.  Woodpeckers have a more complex molt than most passerines.  When aging woodpecker we look at the primary coverts.  Hatch-year (HY) birds will have uniform primary coverts however they will be browinsh and worn in the fall.  SY birds will have a mix of brown retained primary coverts and darker replaced ones.  Note in the 2nd photo below that the outer 3-4 primary coverts have been replaced and are much darker than the unreplaced inner primary coverts.  If this bird was an after second-year (ASY), all of the primary coverts would be uniformly dark.

-Aaron

Northern Flicker (second-year, female)
Note the lack of black malar stripe behind bill indicating female.

Wing of Northern Flicker.
Note the unreplaced inner primary covert are brown next to the blackish replaced outer primary coverts.  This molt pattern indicates a second-year bird - a bird that was hatched in 2014.  

   

Species	Captain Sam's		Little Bear
	New	Recaps	New	Recaps
Northern Flicker	1	-	-	-
Carolina Chickadee	-	1	-	-
Ruby-crowned Kinglet	-	3	-	-
Gray Catbird	3	6	-	-
Brown Thrasher	-	1	-	-
Yellow-rumped Warbler	47	11	-	-
Song Sparrow	1	-	-	-
Swamp Sparrow	-	2	-	-
White-throated Sparrow	1	-	-	-
Northern Cardinal	-	1	-	-

Banding Stats	Captain Sam's	Little Bear	TOTAL
# Birds Banded	53
# of Recaptures	25
# of Species	10
Effort (net-hours)	130.0
Capture Rate (birds/100 net-hours)	60.0
Nets	25

Banding Staff
Aaron Given (CS)