Displeased.

Banding yesterday was an exercise in several different kinds of futility.

Upon arrival at 5:15, it wasn't raining but looked like rain wasn't far off. Because of the nice warm days we'd been having, the water stick at net 23 went from 0.5m on Monday to 1.1m yesterday. The pole had also slid down inside its PVC stilt and there wasn't enough of the pole to actually get the net open. This was fine because between the main trail and the net, I almost went over my chest waders. I could get to it at 6am, but I probably couldn't have gotten there at noon to close it down. Opening 20 was ok, but opening 21 just beyond it didn't happen. Dayna didn't even attempt 11 (crotch deep on Monday), and attempted and failed 13. Those two were above chest wader depth on 5'6" Dayna. This is all fine and good; fewer nets to check in the gully. We caught a Chickadee on the opening net run, and two Redpolls on the subsequent net run. The Chickadee had two pretty good fault bars* running through its tail... tips were broken off at one point and part of the vane was completely missing halfway up one of the central rectricies. The Redpolls were Super Cute. The female had a nice fluid-filled brood patch (if she wasn't already sitting on eggs, she was very close to laying), and her boyfriend was caught in the same net right next to her. Come to find out, their band numbers were within 5 of each other, so they were caught on the same day, and likely at the same time. Yay for mated pairs!

We didn't catch any more birds all day.

It started spitting rain around 8am. We ended up closing net 17, which was catching the rain and sagging. It had stopped by 10am, but it was just enough so that we were damp and cold. Trisha only kept the two school groups about 30 seconds at the station itself, likely because the benches were wet and we didn't have any birds for them.

My chest waders still have a leak, so my right leg was wet most of the day. But those waders aren't insulated, so distinguishing between very cold and very cold & wet was difficult.

No birds and cold and rain = BORED BANDERS. Of course this was the day that Stephan's Nook needed charging and I hadn't thought to replace it with a paperback. I'm going to start bringing my knitting. Also, there are no pictures. Apologies.

Banding summary: 3 birds, 2 species (BCCH, CORE)

After banding was done, there was Barnes & Noble Cafe work to be done. They really need to stop scheduling only 2 people back there at a time. They end up cannibalizing half of their book-floor staff to come save up from the mob. And nothing gets done. Heaven forbid we run out of cookies or something. Nobody can stop running around long enough to bake more.

*Fault bars and growth bars: These are bars of light and dark within feathers (easiest to see in tail feathers) that represent good- and poor-quality feather construction. These bars represent metabolic cycles, usually coinciding with day and night. During the day when birds are eating, they have a lot of extra resources to put into growing high-quality feathers. At night when they're not eating, the feathers they make are lower in quality due to reduced metabolic resources. This cycle results in growth bars. An particularly bad or long low-resource period results in metabolic trauma, which produces fault bars. This is usually due to a rainstorm or chicks in a nest being abandoned by their parents and not fed for awhile. Fault bars are bad-quality sections of feathers that are wider and more severe than growth bars. It is not uncommon for the feather to be so compromised that the feather shaft (rachis) breaks at these points. The alignment of these bars can help in aging a bird. If the bars are all lined up, those feathers all grew at the same time, indicating that the bird is either very young or lost all of its tail to a predator, etc. If the bars are off-set, the bird grew its tail one at a time, either in a symmetrical pattern from a regular molt (indicating an older bird) or in a non-symmetrical pattern from losing one or two feathers at a time to predators, etc.

Set-up (last week) and First Day of Banding (yesterday)!

So, after suffering a winter of working at Old Navy and Barnes & Noble, we are finally getting spring banding underway here at Alaska Bird Observatory's Creamer's Field Migration Station. This is its 20th year gathering banding data, which is one of the longest continuous data-sets in the state of Alaska. The banding station itself is a semi-permanent wall-tent that gets set up in April and taken down in October every year. CFMS (under the direction of Head Bander Sue Guers) runs 30 nets total, only 21 of which are open in the spring. For those of you who have banded before and are used to 2-person field crews, this seems like a lot of nets. Fortunately, ABO has a long list of volunteers who are trained to check the nets and extract birds,

so when it gets busy (mostly in the fall) the banders can stay at the station and band while the volunteers continue to check the nets and bring birds back. I started out doing this whenever my class schedule allowed a morning off when I was working on my degree at UAF. Spring tends to be slow (0-20 birds per day is typical) since the migrants are just beginning to return, and fall varies between moderately busy and crazy busy (50-200 birds per day). The CFMS nets are divided into sections to make them easier to check. Nets 1-7 are the Front, nets 24-30 are the Back, and 11, 13-23 are the Gully, some of which cannot be opened until the seasonal pond evaporates a bit. Nets 8-10 and 12 are the Hinterlands and are also not open in the spring.

Half set-up wall tent

Monday 18 April: Set up the wall-tent, as well as nets 3 and 5, which are double-tall and a general pain in the butt. The poles were long and unwieldy, the nets were twisted, and the ropes were tangled and frozen. The pain-in-the-butt-ness was compounded by the fact that there was knee-deep snow everywhere. The Creamer's Field Refuge is one of the coldest places in town. We snow-machined the tent and the Porta-Potty in, as well as the cement blocks to support the double- and tripple-tall nets. The only birds around were Chickadees (both Black-Capped and Boreal), Redpolls, and Bohemian Waxwings, all of which over-winter in Fairbanks. The Canada Geese had just recently arrived.

Front nets, furled for the night (left).

Tuesday 19 April: Set up the rest of the Front, with the exception of net 6, which was apparently missing a pole. Sue and I set up the Gully nets that were not likely to be too badly flooded the next week (11, 13, 19-23). The snow in the Gully was deep and very powdery.

Wednesday 20 April: Sue and I brought an extra pole for net 6 and got it up, and managed to set up all of the back nets except for 25, which is the triple-tall. Mike arrived part-way through the morning and with 3 of us, we were able to get 25 up. It required 45 minutes and lots of swearing. We had to take the net off of the poles probably four times, which is no small feat when the poles are 30 feet long and there are three nets to get tangled up. On the way out, I noticed that there were a few Greater White-Fronted Geese in the fields mixed in with the many hundreds of Canada Geese. This turned out to be a new species for me... don't ask me how I'd never seen them on the ponds in previous years, I know they've been there. No Sandhill Cranes yet.

Monday 25 April: Let me preface this by saying that Cricket (my 1-year-old black cat) was being an absolute twerp on Sunday night and I got very little sleep in preparation for getting up at 4am. I hadn't been out to the station since Wednesday, so I had no idea how much of the snow had melted. I'd brought break-up boots and rain pants in case it was wet or snowy, but I decided to play it safe and put on the chest waders. Neither Dayna (the other bander) nor Sue put on waders, so I felt a little silly, but whatever. As soon as we got close, it was immediately obvious that the Gully was now full of water and that the chest waders were indeed a Good Plan. Dayna was dispatched back to the farmhouse to get another pair (and also the radios that we'd forgotten). Some time, probably on Thursday or Friday, Sue had installed PVC pipes at a few of the Gully nets with Sharpie marks for water depth (only the best in high-tech equipment for field biologists). The one by net 11 said 0.75m (~2.5 ft) at 6am, and was up to 0.9m (~3 ft) by closing at noon. Hooray for melting snow at an inch per hour. Anyway, since I was the only one with waders at that point, I got to open 11 and 13. I discovered two things as I started into the water: there was still snow beneath the water and there was 1/4 inch layer of ice on top of it. This made for very slow going and lots of rather pretty bruises on my legs until I discovered that my golf club (meant for raising and lowering high net trammels) was good for ice-breaking. Also, the nets had sagged on their poles as they stretched a little (from being scrunched in their bags all winter), so the poles had to be adjusted. This is Not Fun in water and ice. Needless to say, it took me an hour to adjust and open two nets. Go me. Hopefully now that channels have been opened to the nets, the ice layer won't be quite as thick tomorrow. Opening temperature: 28F. Dayna and I swapped off net runs

Sue, banding a Chickadee.

going into the deep water. I think we had about a dozen birds by the end of the day (I was a Bad Bander and didn't look at the final tally), all Black-Capped Chickadees and Common Redpolls*. One of the CORE's had the beginnings of a nice brood-patch, yay! Someone thought they saw a Lesser Yellowlegs out on the pond, and there was a pair of Sandhill Cranes in the front field. We didn't catch the LEYE, much to my great disappointment, nor did we catch either of the Great-Horned Owls that were yakking up a storm all morning. Probably for the best... our poor nets wouldn't survive an owl that big. Sue thinks they've got a nest somewhere within the station, since usually owls aren't calling at 10 in the morning. We had two school groups come through, and we were lucky to have at least one bird at the station for each of them. Closing Temperature: 52F. Hopefully the Juncos will be here by tomorrow! All my bird pictures were bad since my lens was all fogged up. >___<

*EDIT* Banding summary: 10 birds, 2 species (BCCH, CORE)

P.S. I will try to keep the language PG-rated. However, the nature of living things is to take in elements of their environments and incorporate them into themselves. Usually this is food and air. My linguistic environment has been decidedly polluted.

Intro and Info

This is for anyone who might have stumbled upon this blog and would like to know what's going on. Also for anyone who just doesn't know what's going on because I neglected to explain it (for which I sincerely apologize). If you already know what's going on, feel free to just skip this entry. :)

Name: Sarah
Age: 24
Height: 5'1" (this is important)
Hometown: Katy, TX
Current Town: Fairbanks, AK
Education: BSc in Biological Sciences (UAF 2009), 1 year of grad school (OSU Zoology)

Birdie-Stuff History: Alaska Bird Observatory 2005-2009, UAF Ornithology class 2007, Institute for Bird Populations 2008 & 2009, Klamath Bird Observatory 2010, Alaska Bird Observatory 2011. Also: mother, grandmother, aunt, uncle, great-aunt & uncle, great-uncle.

Rusty Blackbird, with his band.

What is bird banding? Bird banding (or ringing, in Europe) is the process by which a band (usually aluminum) is placed on a bird's leg. This band fits like a bracelet, is light enough that it doesn't affect the bird's mobility or survival, loose enough that it doesn't rub a raw spot on the leg, and contains a unique number that is associated with that bird for the rest of its life (like a social security number). While the bird is in-hand, an entire suite of measurements and data are taken and recorded. These measurements (explained later) help to determine age and sex, whether the bird is breeding and/or incubating eggs, whether the bird is currently molting or has molted recently, as well as general health and body condition. All this data goes into an international database that can be accessed by scientists who study the ecology, physiology, populations, and life-histories of the birds.

Why band birds? First, banding helps scientists track changes in avian populations. This includes factors like productivity (how many babies), survivorship (are the babies surviving their first winter and how long are the adults living), and recruitment/emigration (young birds moving away from their parents' territories). We can also look at population trends (increases and decreases), age and sexual structure (ratios of young/old and male/female). Banding data, along with info on other animal and plant species and abiotic factors like weather and pollution, can help us study habitat relationships as well. Birds, and songbirds especially, are excellent indicators of the ecological health of a habitat, and the current decline of these populations is a worrying sign of habitat malaise and environmental distress.

A typical mist-net.

How do you catch them? Most banders use mist-nets, which use a very fine mesh, the size of which is determined by what kind of birds they want to catch. Bigger birds = larger mesh. For example, ~15mm squares is pretty typical for songbirds. The net is fine enough that unwary humans often miss them (birds also have very good eyesight). These nets are usually 3m tall x 12m long, and supported by poles on either end. Mostly, these nets are only as far off the ground as they need to be, but they can be raised into the canopy layer to catch more species, or stacked 2 or 3 on top of one another. They can also be run together length-wise in a series. Nets are situated either randomly or (more often) in strategic habitat areas where birds are known to be active. Songbird-targeted nets are usually open in the 6 hours immediately following sunrise since birds are most active during this time. Nets targeted to nocturnal species like owls are opened after full-dark. There are 4 J-shaped panels that form pockets. When a bird hits the net, it slides down and rests in one of the pockets until someone comes to extract it. Getting the bird out of the net safely and quickly is the trickiest part of the entire process and takes years to perfect, since each situation is slightly different.

You can view the pictures full-size by clicking on them!

That's all for info stuff. There'll be a post immediately after this about yesterday's banding adventures!

P.S. All photos are (c) me, unless otherwise credited.

Blog-Thing

I stole this rather good idea from Erin. Previously, I'd been disseminating my birdie adventures via both Facebook and email (for my non-FB relatives), which was rather annoying. Because I'd forget to do the email. And my relatives would yell at me. Also, having to distill a 10-day banding period's worth of photos down to the best 8 or so that would fit in an email made me sad. Therefore, blog. Where anyone can see it and I can put photos into context. I'll likely cross-post this to Facebook as well for the sake of convenience.