Still waiting on that cold front

Captain Sam's

The bird activity continues to be slow at Capt. Sam’s with only 21 new birds and 9 recaptures, comprised of 9 species this morning.  We do have hope that bird activity will pick up in the near future.  A cold front is scheduled to move through this weekend, bringing with it cooler temps and hopefully migrants.  The cold front has slowly been making its way east and over the past few nights has sparked the movement of migrants across the Central Flyway.  Once the front moves through, we should see a similar movement of migrants in the Atlantic Flyway.  Below are radar images showing last night’s migration.               

 - Mattie

 Little Bear
We had a quiet morning today at the Little Bear banding site. We banded 11 new bird and had 7 recaptures of 8 species. The make up of species consisted mainly of resident birds, but we did manage to catch a couple of migrants as well. The highlight of our day was a hatch year male Yellow-breasted Chat, a first for this site. We're able to differentiate between males and females of this species by the color of their lores (the feathers between the bill and eye). Females will have dark grey lores while male Chats have black lores.  We also caught 3 new Cardinals today bringing our season total at Little Bear to 27 individuals banded.

-Nancy

Yellow-breasted Chat (hatch year, male)

 

Species	Captain Sam's		Little Bear
	New	Recaps	New	Recaps
Traill's Flycatcher	1	-	-	-
White-eyed Vireo		-	1	-
Red-eyed Vireo	3	1	-	1
Carolina Wren	-	1	2	3
Prairie Warbler	4	-	-	-
American Redstart	3	-	-	-
Northern Waterthrush	-	-	1	-
Common Yellowthroat	6	1	-	1
Yellow-breasted Chat	-	-	1	-
Northern Cardinal	-	4	3	2
Painted Bunting	4	2	3	-

Banding Stats	Captain Sam's	Little Bear	TOTAL
# Birds Banded	21	11	32
# of Recaptures	9	7	16
# of Species	9	8	11
Effort (net-hours)	118.75	50	168.75
Capture Rate (birds/100 net-hours)	25.2	36.0	28.44
Nets	25	10	35

BANDING STAFF
Aaron Given (CS)
Mattie VandenBoom (CS)
Chris Snook (LB)
Nancy Raginski (LB)
Sean McElaney (LB)
Ryan Donnelly (CS)