Keep Your Eyes on the Sparrows

 Captain Sam's:

    Our morning at Captain Sam's was quite foggy which let our minds wander. We enjoyed some peace and quite among the Yellow-rumped Warbler chips flying over, the few and far between flight calls of American Pipits. I was quite surprised with our totals for today based on the warm temperatures and the higher levels of humidity. Of the fun catches of the day we had a few Eastern Towhees and a female Sharp-shinned Hawk! Funny enough the sharpie was in net 29 which was the same net I extracted our Coopers Hawk out of last week!

Hatch-year female Sharp-shinned Hawk

- Nate

Little Bear:

Today was a nice day. It was a slow day but it was nice to have some cloud covers during our time out at little bear. We ended with a total of 43 birds and only 6 of them being recaptures. We added little bears first of the season Blue-headed Vireo. This little guy was a cutie but did not want to be nice enough, the biting and yelling, which just allowed us to just release it to go back to being cute from a distance. We had our second White-throated Sparrow that was recaptured. I didn't recognize the band number, so with some digging around previous year banding data, I found out this bird was banded back on 11/2/2020 as a hatch year. So this bird is 2 years old! I'm glad that it decided to come back to little bear. I looked up the band number for last years (2021) and found that this bird did not show up. So, this cutie must have taken a different route or skipped past us last year. I had to take a photo of this bird, shown below, because it was so nice and well behaved! 

After seeing Brendan's photos yesterday out at the beach, I had to join them this morning. He saw a star fish and I have only seen ones that are no longer alive. So, as I enjoyed the nice morning, I finally saw my first live one that was not in an aquarium! Another treat that I captured today and is not pictured is a Black Racer. As we were walking out to the station this morning, I caught a glimpse of something sitting in a tree. I stopped and had to take a look and found a beautiful snake sleeping in the Wax Myrtle bushes.

-Kristin 

Species	Captain Sams		Little Bear
	New	Recaps	New	Recaps
Yellow-billed Cuckoo	-	-	1	-
Sharp-shinned Hawk	1	-	-	-
Eastern Phoebe	-	1	-	-
Blue-headed Vireo	-	-	1	-
Ruby-crowned Kinglet	1	1	4	-
House Wren	-	1	1	-
Gray Catbird	4	3	6	4
Hermit Thrush	1	-	-	-
White-throated Sparrow	-	-	-	1
Swamp Sparrow	-	1	3	-
Eastern Towhee	1	1	-	-
Orange-crowned Warbler	1	-	-	-
Common Yellowthroat	1	-	2	-
American Redstart	1	-	-	-
Palm Warbler (Western)	1	-	-	-
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle)	43	1	18	-
Northern Cardinal	-	-	-	1
Painted Bunting	1	-	1	-

Today's Banding Stats	Captain Sams	Little Bear	TOTAL
# Birds Banded	56	37	93
# of Recaptures	9	6	15
# of Species	14	11	18
Effort (net-hours)	146.7	105.8	256.3
Capture Rate (birds/100 net-hours)	44.3	40.6	42.1
# of Nets	30	23	53

2022 Fall Cumulative Banding Stats	Captain Sams	Little Bear	TOTAL
# Birds Banded	4632	2,814	7446
# of Recaptures	1112	645	1768
# of Species	80	83	97
Effort (net-hours)	11175.07	5,782.55	16,804.55
Capture Rate (birds/100 net-hours)	51.4	59.8	54.8
# of Days	74	65	-

Banding Staff

Aaron Given (CS)

Kristin Attinger (LB)

Nate Watkins (CS)

Katie Serba (CS)
Brendan Wang (LB) 

Aidan Place (CS)

Maia Nguyen (LB)