Sunday, November 1, 2020

It's Still A Little Spooky After Halloween

Captain Sam's:

Happy first of November! We had decent numbers today despite a couple surprise rain showers, with 37 new birds and 11 recaptures. Some stand-out captures include another Brown Creeper, a Blue-headed Vireo, and a Savannah Sparrow (a season first for Captain Sam's!). In contrast with the Brown Creeper we caught yesterday, we were actually able to age today's as a hatch-year due to incomplete ossification of the skull. Dan alluded to using the white tips of their primary coverts as aging criteria in yesterday's blog post, but it's difficult to do so when there is no frame of reference. Thus, we were quite excited to be able to compare the wings of these two individuals. As you can see below, the individual with unknown age from yesterday had much more white on its primary coverts than the hatch-year individual from today. This makes us suspect that this feather characteristic may be a way to age Brown Creepers if yesterday's bird was in fact an after hatch year. Whether this is reliable or not, it's fascinating to compare! Maybe we will catch more Brown Creepers before the end of the season to see if it holds up. 

Brown Creeper of unknown age from 10/31/20.
Note the amount of white on primary coverts compared to...

...a known hatch-year's wing. 

- Sarah S. 

Little Bear:

Today was a lot better than the past few days. The wind died down quite a bit allowing us to open all of our nets. We had a total of 48 birds with 7 of them being recaptures. Our highlight today were three Blackpoll Warblers. We did have an unexpected short rain shower today, which was not as fun because it got very muggy after it was done. Pictured below is one of the few Song Sparrows that we captured today that show a great example of a molt limit that can occur in Song Sparrows.  


Song Sparrow
Song Sparrow:  Hatch-year

As you can see in the image above, the red lines indicate new feather growth while the feathers highlighted in blue are retained juvenile feathers. This type feather replacement pattern is called an eccentric molt because it starts in the middle of the a feather tract and is somewhat unusual. You can see the replaced feathers (the outer 5) are darker and have a fresher look to them. This can be a difficult molt limit to see sometimes, but if you look even closer at the tips of the feathers you can see how the wear (the edging is rough compared to a nice smooth edge) is different between the replaced feathers and the retained feathers. In addition, it replaced the tertials (the three secondaries closest to the body) which is also highlighted in red.  

I hope tomorrow, even though the wind is suppose to be high, that the northwest winds tonight will bring in a few good birds!

-Kristin 


  Species  Captain Sam'sLittle Bear
NewRecapsNewRecaps
Blue-headed Vireo
1---
Brown Creeper
1---
House Wren
--21
Carolina Wren
-1--
Golden-crowned Kinglet
1---
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
1---
Swainson's Thrush
1---
Hermit Thrush
2---
Gray Catbird
95104
Brown Thrasher
-1--
Northern Mockingbird
1---
Savannah Sparrow
1---
Song Sparrow
-141
Swamp Sparrow
4-1-
White-throated Sparrow
-1--
Common Yellowthroat
3-51
Cape May Warbler
--2-
Blackpoll Warbler
--3-
Black-throated Blue Warbler
-1--
Palm Warbler (western subspecies)
7-4-
Yellow-rumped Warbler (myrtle subspecies)
418-
Northern Cardinal
1-1-
Painted Bunting
--1-



Today's Banding StatsCaptain Sam'sLittle BearTOTAL
# Birds Banded
37
41
78
# of Recaptures
11
7
18
# of Species
19
11
22
Effort (net-hours)
171.0
138
309
Capture Rate (birds/100 net-hours)
28.1
34.8
31.1
# of Nets
30
23
-


2020 Fall Cumulative Banding Stats Captain Sam'sLittle BearTOTAL
# Birds Banded
3899
2,385
6,284
# of Recaptures
814
403
1,217
# of Species
75
69
86
Effort (net-hours)
9408.8
6,253.7
15,662.5
Capture Rate (birds/100 net-hours)
50.1
44.6
47.9
# of Days7764-

 

Banding Staff

Aaron Given (CS)
Vincent Weber (CS)
Dan Errichetti (CS)
Kristin Attinger (LB)
Sarah Stewart (CS)
Josh Lefever (LB)