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Archived Postings

June 4, 2009 – June 10, 2009

Spring migration monitoring at the LSLBO has come to an end. Our final day of counting and banding the little migrants was on June 10. The tail end of migration is usually fairly quiet with only a few individuals passing through. Canada warblers, mourning warblers, and alder flycatchers made up most of the final migrant species. Two notable birds captured were the first male magnolia warbler and first Wilson’s warbler of the spring. Nicole was excited about the Wilson’s warbler, mostly because she claims that they look like they wear a toupee. Most other birds we captured were resident breeders. It always makes be a little sad when spring migration ends. As each species returns from their wintering grounds I greet them like an old friend I haven’t seen for a long time. But inevitably the time of year comes when the birds are no longer interested in being greeted, they are too busy with their nesting and parental duties. It’s now time to rate our spring. First the disclaimer. The numbers presented here are not final. For whatever reason, no matter how hard we keep track, the numbers never match up when we double-check the data. That’s just how banding data goes. But the preliminary number crunching tells us that we banded 1117 birds. This is above the average spring total of 938 and is actually the fourth highest spring banding total in the sixteen years of operations. We didn’t have much chance at beating the highest spring banding total, which was 2590 birds back in 2000. Diversity was bang on the spring average, we banded 45 different species. Dark-eyed juncos took top spot with 237 banded. Thanks to the big flocks we caught in late April they destroyed their previous record of 108. Other top species banded were Swainson’s thrush, white-throated sparrow, least flycatcher, and chipping sparrow. All these species had average totals and are usually within the top ten banded species every spring. American redstarts, which are one of the bread-and-butter spring species at the LSLBO, were sorely missed this spring. Only a fraction of their typical numbers were banded. We also missed banding an entire family, the vireos. Even though a fair share of all four species (red-eyed, warbling, Philadelphia, and blue-headed) were seen around the station, we were unable to catch any of them. Now that spring migration has finished the LSLBO will immediately move on to the next project. Over the next six weeks the LSLBO will be working on the MAPS, or Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship program. This program essentially monitors bird populations on the breeding grounds. MAPS is less intensive as daily migration monitoring. Each of the four sites is visited once every ten days. The less intensive schedule is offset by horrific working conditions. Two of the four sites we operate are far away from a coffee maker. Sometimes terrible sacrifices have to be made for science.

2010