October 17

Captain Sam's

Captain Sam's was relatively slow this morning with only 45 birds total, and 17 of those were recaptures. Some highlights were two Eastern Phoebes and a Yellow-billed Cuckoo. Migrating overhead we had large amounts of Tree Swallows, White Ibis, Eastern Bluebirds, and even a Brown-headed Nuthatch, but they stayed in the tree tops. If we could fly we'd stay up there too to escape the king tides which left us banding in ankle deep water today. Lucky birds!

Little Bear

Little Bear was slower this morning than it has been over the past few days, with only 30 new birds and 16 recaptures of 12 different species. The bulk of the birds were Gray Catbirds once again, but we did catch something a little unusual: a Blue Jay.

Blue Jay (Hatch-year, sex unknown)

Although Blue Jays are common throughout eastern North America, they are not commonly captured in mist-nets. Their combination of size, intelligence, and staying above the level of the nets keeps them from hitting and staying in the nets.

On a side note, the high king tides of the past few days have made banding at Little Bear interesting. The site is situated back in a hollow at the eastern end of dunes next to a salt marsh inlet at the east end of the island, and heavy rain will leave us with several inches of standing water because it has nowhere to drain from aside from seeping out through the sand. Hurricane Matthew flooded the site with up to two feet of water in places, but over the past week much of that has filtered out through the ground and left us with the same amount of water as the result from a couple inches of rain.

To our surprise yesterday, around mid-morning the water seemed to start getting noticeably deeper in the flooded sections. About the same time, the tide came in so high that the water in the salt marsh was almost up to the top of the dunes on the eastern edge of the site. Clearly, water was seeping back through the dunes and into the site. When the tide peaked it reached a gap in the dunes somewhere toward the southeast boundary of the site and we suddenly had a river of salt water running beneath some of the nets.

The same thing happened again this morning (and likely will again tomorrow as well), and we had to raise the bottom of the nets up so that birds wouldn't end up in the rising water. The deepest areas almost reached the same depth that we found when we returned to the site after the hurricane, meaning we had to walk carefully to avoid sloshing water over the tops of our rubber boots.

It would be interesting to know if the hurricane caused the gap in the dunes and increased the tidal flooding, as the storm chewed away between 125 and 150 feet of dunes down most of the length of the island, but we haven't done enough poking around back in that section of the site to know for sure.

--Blaine

 

Species	Captain Sam's		Little Bear
	New	Recaps	New	Recaps
Yellow-billed Cuckoo	1	-	-	-
"Traill's Flycatcher"	-	-	1	-
Eastern Phoebe	2	-	-	-
Blue Jay	-	-	1	-
Carolina Chickadee	-	-	1	1
House Wren	1	2	2	-
Carolina Wren	-	-	-	1
Gray Catbird	15	12	20	11
Northern Mockingbird	1	-	-	-
Common Yellowthroat	2	-	1	-
Palm Warbler (Western)	1	-	-	-
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle)	1	-	1	-
Yellow-breasted Chat	-	-	1	-
Song Sparrow	1	-	-	-
Eastern Towhee	-	-	1	-
Northern Cardinal	1	3	1	-
Painted Bunting	2	-	-	1

Banding Stats	Captain Sam's	Little Bear	TOTAL
# Birds Banded	28	30	58
# of Recaptures	17	14	31
# of Species	11	12	17
Effort (net-hours)	129.4	76.0	205.4
Capture Rate (birds/100 net-hours)	34.8	57.9	43.3
# of Nets	26	19	45

Banding Staff
Aaron Given (CS)
Blaine Carnes (LB)
Mattie VandenBoom (LB)
Alison Nevins (CS)
Col Lauzau (CS)
Michael Gamble (CS)
Michael Rodgers (LB)
Ryan Donnelly (CS)