Even the Catbirds were Quiet

 Captain Sams:

Bird activity slow down quite a bit today with 34 new birds and 26 recaptures.  We had more recaptured Gray Catbirds than new ones, which will be a common theme moving forward unless we get another push of catbirds.  We banded our first-of-the-season Savannah Sparrow and the 4th Blackpoll Warbler of the fall.  

After a very slow start to this season, the end of September and October has been very good.  We hit the 4000 mark yesterday which prompted me to take a closer look at previous years because I could not remember banding 4000 birds this early in the season before.  Sure enough, we hadn't.  The closest we had even been was 3678 back in 2014.  Hopefully, this trend continues for the rest of October and November as we might be heading towards a record breaking year!   

-Aaron

Little Bear:

There weren't many birds active at Little Bear either today and by the end of the morning it was almost eerily silent. Our most abundant bird was Gray Catbird once again, but we actually had a few more new ones than recaptures this time. We banded two new Swamp Sparrows, which have been really fun to have in the hand, and one new Prairie Warbler, which have become few and far between since they had their big push earlier in the season. We also recaptured a Song Sparrow from a couple days ago that has an interesting molt limit where only the 9th primary feather has been replaced so far. Since it was so slow today, we closed a little early and used the rest of our time to do some net repairs.

-Katie 

Species	Captain Sams		Little Bear
	New	Recaps	New	Recaps
Downy Woodpecker	-	1	-	-
Gray Catbird	10	18	11	8
Swainson's Thrush	-	-	-	1
House Wren	5	-	4	-
Ruby-crowned Kinglet	1	-	2	-
Ovenbird	-	3	-	-
Black-and-white Warbler	-	-	1	-
Common Yellowthroat	8	3	5	1
American Redstart	2	1	1	-
Blackpoll Warbler	1	-	-	-
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle)	5	-	7	-
Prairie Warbler	-	-	1	-
Yellow-breasted Chat	1	-	-	-
Savannah Sparrow	1	-	-	-
Song Sparrow	-	-	-	1
Swamp Sparrow	-	-	2	-
Eastern Towhee	-	-	-	1
Northern Cardinal	-	-	-	1
Painted Bunting	-	-	-	1

Today's Banding Stats	Captain Sams	Little Bear	TOTAL
# Birds Banded	34	34	68
# of Recaptures	26	14	39
# of Species	11	14	19
Effort (net-hours)	153.0	103.5	256.5
Capture Rate (birds/100 net-hours)	39.2	46.4	41.7
# of Nets	30	23	-

2022 Fall Cumulative Banding Stats	Captain Sams	Little Bear	TOTAL
# Birds Banded	4060	2598	6,658
# of Recaptures	1002	539	1,541
# of Species	78	73	91
Effort (net-hours)	9492.3	4,808.55	14,300.85
Capture Rate (birds/100 net-hours)	53.3	65.2	57.3
# of Days	63	54	-

Banding Staff

Aaron Given (CS)

Kristin Attinger (LB)

Nate Watkins (CS)

Katie Serba (LB)
Brendan Wang (CS) 

Aidan Place (CS)

Maia Nguyen (CS)

Aidan Given (CS)

Wes Floyd (CS)