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Archived Postings

July 31, 2006 – August 6, 2006

July 31 to August 6, 2006 Banding this week started off slow. The weather was far from suitable, with rain and heavy winds. It pretty much kept all bird activity at a standstill, which wasn’t a bad thing. A couple of rain days were almost welcome; the paperwork and data entry was starting to pile up from all the banding we’ve been doing lately. Once the weather cleared, it was business as usual as the birds dried off their feathers and continued with their migration. When banding resumed, capture rates remained steady with another 350 birds banded this week. By weeks end, the banding total for the fall reached 1433 birds. The busiest day of banding was on the 3rd when a large flock of Tennessee warblers hit the nets late in the morning. Tennessee warblers alone accounted for half of the 119 birds banded that day. This week we banded the first blue-headed vireo of the year and the first sharp-shinned hawk of the fall. With the large banding totals seen recently, it is clearly obvious that birds are migrating. Most of the sightings so far this fall have been from birds flittering around the trees or in the nets, but there has been little in terms of visual migration. This changed when a large passage of migrants occurred on August 6th. The birds started flying overhead very early in the morning and continued in a constant stream for most of the day. The majority of the birds moving were yellow-rumped warblers….375 were counted. They were joined by large numbers of Tennessee warblers, American redstarts, and yellow warblers. Of course there were many birds accounted for as simply unidentified warblers or songbirds. Identifying little birds flying 50 feet over your head is challenging at best, sometimes impossible, but we try to figure out as many as we can. It is easy to count them all as unidentified, which is basically saying, “yup….some birds are flying over”. Where is the fun in that? We received a letter from the Banding Office bearing great news! Two of the northern saw-whet owls banded by the LSLBO in the fall of 2005 were recovered in two separate areas in Montana. Each one was recovered about a month after it was originally banded. The migratory population of northern saw-whet owls is poorly understood, some migrate while others choose not to. Recoveries like these do provide some insight into the migration patterns of the owls, such as how far and how fast they migrate. Statistically, less than 1% of all birds banded are recovered. The LSLBO banded 131 saw-whets during the 2005 fall owl banding. To have two of those recovered is…well…just cool.

2010