The other thing I've been doing in my spare writing time is working on this thing that I started for NaNoWriMo two years ago. Needless to say, I didn't finish it in the allotted month, nor in the allotted month the next year. But I've kept adding tidbits to it, slowly, so here's what I have so far:
Based upon actual events. Names and a few insignificant facts have been changed.
Forward
You know that book-turned-movie “The Big Year” and the utter nerdiness that is contained therein? This story is in some ways both more and less nerd-tastic than that.
I am involved in bird research… banding, to be specific, which is quite possibly the most widespread and standardized biological field protocol in use today, and not just in the world of birds and mark-recapture studies. The fact that I was doing research and actually had these birds in hand makes it nerdier. The fact that I was getting paid (a pittance, but nonetheless paid) and that this was a vital part of a college education in biology dilutes the nerd factor somewhat. In other words, it wasn’t just for fun, and it wasn’t just a wild hare with no greater purpose.
I would also like to officially absolve the Institute for Bird Populations (IBP) of any blame whatsoever in the events that follow. My clumsiness is my own and it was an invaluable learning experience, not to mention a good story. Also, it quite obviously hasn’t scared me off of bird banding or field biology.
Prologue
My biographic blurb, if I had one, would read something like this:
Sarah was born in Colorado and grew up in Texas. She then ran far far away and graduated with a BS in Biological Sciences from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2009. During her original stay in Fairbanks, her aunt introduced her to the Creamer’s Field Migratory Station and to mist netting, and she volunteered whenever her classes allowed (and sometimes when they didn’t). She worked for the University of Alaska Museum of the North’s Mammalogy department doing molecular genetics and was introduced to field-work looking for Collared Pikas in Valdez, Cordova, and the Denali Highway. Sarah spent a summer and a half and a fall (respectively) as an intern for the Institute for Bird Populations in eastern Washington and Klamath Bird Observatory in southern Oregon and northern California. During her year as a graduate student and teaching assistant at Oregon State University, she realized that, while the molecular biology of garter snake reproduction is interesting, birds are her true calling. She started working as a bander for Creamer’s Field Migration Station in the spring of 2011. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, drawing & painting, hiking/camping/birding, volcanoes & glaciers, social cooking, Firefly and The Big Bang Theory, playing piano and flute, and tormenting her cat, Cricket, with a laser pointer. If she were a bird, she’d like to be a kestrel but would probably end up as a chickadee.
This story explains that “half” summer in the Pacific Northwest.
September: Fairbanks, AK
“You’re getting good at extracting… you could probably get a summer internship somewhere. It could get your foot in the door for some really exciting banding work.”
This came from Sue, the head bander at Fairbanks’ local bird banding station, as I finally pulled a recalcitrant Black-Capped Chickadee free of a mist-net. After four and a half gruelling minutes of picking nylon strings out of feathers and feet and pleading with the very angry chickadee, the ego boost was welcome, but it also started me thinking. The previous summer, I’d gone in the field with a grad student to do pika and vole work. It was serious fieldwork… the beautiful and picturesque middle of nowhere, camping, no facilities or showers for the duration of each trip (2 weeks), and arctic ground squirrels chewing on your bootlaces. I had to get certified for gun and bear safety… because it was necessary. An entire summer of that, but with birds? Hell yes.
January: Fairbanks, AK
It was Christmas break before I actually got around to looking for and applying for summer work. I’d just finished making an A in the greatest class ever (not every class encourages you to torture your lab partners in the name of science), and the subsequent high made me aim absolutely nowhere. I applied for anything and everything that looked even remotely interesting, staying away from any posting postings that mentioned ‘invasive plant control’ (weeding) and ‘trail maintenance’ (digging). Since my first field job was just an extension of my lab job, I hadn’t had to apply for it. The job search itself was nothing if not educational.
There are several job boards where biology- and wildlife-related jobs and internships are posted. Applying for these is not even remotely similar to applying for real jobs in the real world. You email a resume and cover letter to an actual person (usually a graduate student, professor, or research scientist at a non-profit organization) who will then look over it and possibly 20 to 50 others. When applying for real jobs, as I found out later, you fill out an application online, possibly attach a resume, and a computer looks at all 700 of them and bounces out all but the top two or three percent for an actual HR person to look at. In this case, it could be six months before you hear back, if you hear back at all, and that’s usually an automated condolence response. I got replies within a week of the application deadline from every single one of the field jobs… and a real live person wrote the condolence emails.
Also, although most field jobs pay little to nothing, a good number of them will house you or provide campsites. The good ones provide field vehicles (or gas reimbursement) and a small stipend that will usually cover food and necessary personal hygiene products. This is probably because making poor college students and recent graduates look for housing (usually) in the middle of nowhere for two to six months on short notice and is just ridiculous. There’d be an uprising.
I was thoroughly tickled when one of the bird banding places emailed me to set up an interview. Since all field biologists are poor, 99% of field biology interviews are conducted over the phone. Come spring, field biologists do a great shuffle and spread out all over the country and the world for the migration and breeding seasons of various forms of life. Trying to get someone to come in person for an interview is futile and silly. There is no such thing as a ‘local applicant’. My interview went something like this:
“Hi, I’m Ted, one of the biologists on this project, and you’re on speakerphone with Tim, our other biologist, and Phil, the project director. We’ve got your resume in front of us, but how about if you tell us a bit about your previous field experience.”
“Blah blah with pikas and voles in Alaska, blah blah bears and safety, blah blah, Alaska Bird Observatory, blah blah, volunteering, blah blah, extraction experience--”
“You’ve extracted birds before? You’ve got mist-net experience?” They sounded excited at this point.
“Yes.”
“Do you have any banding experience?”
“No, but I’ve watched it done a bunch of times.”
“That’s great! We send our interns out in pairs, and one of them needs to have a personal vehicle for getting between lodging and banding sites… do you have a vehicle at your disposal?”
“…Well, no…”
“Ok, no worries. How well do you know birds by sight and sound?”
“Well, I know most of the species in Alaska, and quite a few of those overlap with the Pacific Northwest—”
“How good are you with songs?”
“Mediocre, but I’ve got a good ear for pitch—”
“Musician?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Excellent. Since you’re familiar with some of the Northwest species, we’d like to place you there, unless you have one of our other regions in mind…?”
“No no, the Northwest sounds wonderful!”
“Our training is in Grants Pass, Oregon. You can fly into Medford and someone can meet you, if that’s more convenient. We start on May 1st and go for about two weeks. At the end of training, you’ll be assigned a field partner and a location. You’ll go with your biologist and a couple other pairs and help set up their sites before going to your own.”
“My last final exam is on the 11th, so I couldn’t be there until the 12th at the earliest—”
“That’s fine… most of the first part of training is learning to extract, so you’ve got a huge advantage there. Honestly, banding is easy… you do the same thing to each bird. Extraction is the hardest part of the process because each bird is different. The only way to get good is to extract hundreds of birds in hundreds of different situations. We’ll have training set up in a campground outside of Grants Pass, and I assume you’ll need someone to come pick you up at the Medford airport?”
“Yes, but—”
“Great! You’ll be paid a per-diem that should cover your food and incidentals, and we’ll email you a packing list and a species list to familiarize yourself with. I’ll also send you our contact information… just pass along your flight information when you’ve got it. Any questions about any of this?”
“I got the job?”
“Well, yes, of course.”
“Oh… well, great then. Um, I can’t think of any questions right now, but I’m sure something will come to mind eventually.”
“Shoot us an email if it does, don’t be shy. And start sleeping with your field guide under your pillow!”
“Um, sure, yeah. Thank you so much… I’m really looking forward to this spring!”
“We look forward to meeting you in person. Bye now!”
“Goodbye.”
I looked over at my roommate, who was smirking at me. “You look a little shell-shocked. Did you get press-ganged again? You really need to learn how to say no. Don’t ever go car shopping by yourself.”
“Well, I’ve got a summer internship… They were a little pushy. Or maybe they were just excited? But the mafia uses non-profit organizations as money-laundering fronts, right?”
“Probably, but that conversation sounded entirely too nerdy to be related to organized crime. Where’s it at?”
“Starting in Oregon, but it’s the entire Pacific Northwest… where’s Grant’s Pass?”
“Shit if I know. Silly Lower 48 with all their cities. Awesome volcanoes in that area though… take pictures for me, yeah?” Aleria was a geology major. She wouldn’t let us throw rocks at boys because we might hurt the rocks. We nerds have a special pheromone so we can identify each other at crowded parties. It’s a survival mechanism.
“Speaking of shit… I probably need to acquire a tent at some point between now and May.”
“Yeah, I hear Oregon’s rainy.”
“Well, crap.”
11 May: Fairbanks, AK
I envied my lab partner who spent the entire semester of Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates with a mild head cold. I had to use an artificial means of knocking out my olfactory nerves, namely VapoRub. After using the same fish, pigeon, and cat specimens for the entire 3-month semester, the entire class had started eyeing poor Katie with things that ranged from jealousy to plotting the acquisition of her infectious agents… difficult to tell exactly with all our faces in a permanent state of nose-wrinkling.
Anyone who has made it through a biological education without becoming intimately familiar with the smells of formalin and decay should feel cheated. The carcinogenic preservatives are quite aromatic, even before the liver enzymes of the various organisms began liquefying everything.
“Are you ready for the final tomorrow?”
“Near enough.”
“You just want to run away, don’t you? Where’s the gall bladder?”
I inspected our monstrously large cat’s open peritoneal cavity and poked at the liver-sludge with a blunt probe. “Under there… somewhere.”
Katie leaned over to look where I was pointing. “Ok, you’ve made your point. Let’s get to someplace better ventilated than this.” As we made our way to the storage cabinet, she inclined her head toward the shelf bearing our plastic-wrapped pigeon. “You’ll be doing bird stuff this summer, right? I bet the live ones don’t smell quite so ripe.”
I laughed. “Yeah, but some of them bite.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Day after tomorrow morning at ass-crack thirty.”
“You’re not packed yet, are you? How are you going to fit all your field gear into two suitcases?”
I shrugged. “I have a medical condition… I can’t pack a suitcase unless I’m panicked about it. Also, I plan to pack very little in the way of actual clothes. Boots and binoculars and a sleeping bag are much more important.”
“Have you worn your boots yet this spring? Sprung any new leaks since last fall?”
“Um…”
“Do yourself a favor and fill ‘em full of water in the shower before you leave. Boots flooded with freezing cold, scummy pond water is no fun at all. Also, scrimp on shirts all you want, but pack every pair of socks you own.”
“Yeah, I’ll put that right at the top of my list: ‘Fill boots with water’ and ‘Negotiate with laundry fairies for return of stolen socks.’ Right above finding gall bladders in liver-goo and remembering how to spell ‘brachiocephalic’. Got it.”
12 May: Fairbanks, AK
“If I’ve got to be at the airport at 6:30 and Beqa’s got to be there at 5:30, there’s really no point in you making two trips. I’ll just go early and veg by the window,” I said.
“Is there any way to make getting up that early not suck?” Beqa asked. We were no more than 8 hours done with finals and stress sleep and airplane sleep just aren’t as good as the real thing. It was already quite late.
“At this point, I think we should just stay up. I can come home and sleep and you guys can sleep on your planes,” Chaia suggested.
Beqa looked mildly horrified. “How are we going to stay up? We’re exhausted as it is!”
Chaia and I glanced at each other and nodded decisively. “Mario Kart,” she said.
“And mudslides,” I added.
As it turned out, Beqa had never played Mario Kart on a Wii… or on anything else for that matter. Teaching her took the better part of an hour, and by the time we were ready for alcoholic beverages, Chaia’s fiancée and brother-in-law-to-be had already gone to bed. The problem with mudslides is that they require a blender, which is not the most quiet of kitchen appliances… up there with coffee grinders, garbage disposals and exploding microwaves.
We plotted and schemed. The bathroom was dismissed for its echo. Trying to make mudslides without a blender was almost as unacceptable as not having them at all. We plotted and schemed some more. The most likely plan was to run an extension cord outside for the blender. We’d gone as far as locating the aforementioned extension cord when there was a sudden revelation from Chaia: “Wait. Wait! We live in Fairbanks… in Alaska. It gets cold here in the winter. We don’t need an extension cord… we have electrical outlets outside!”
And so we plugged the blender into the car plug-in outlet in the parking lot in front of Chaia’s apartment. Blenders are a bit difficult to control if not resting on a solid counter-like surface. This was a little blender and it nearly sent Beqa flying. Needless to say, Mario Kart was a lot funnier after that.
And yes, we made it to the airport on time. We were even mostly sober.
13 May: Fairbanks, AK, Seattle, WA, Portland, Medford, and Grants Pass, OR
As I recall, the flights from Fairbanks to Seattle and then Seattle to Portland were uneventful. However, the teeny-tiny little puddle-jumper flight from Portland to Medford was the longest forty-five minutes of my life. Flying in those things is like riding in a car with no suspension or a bike with no shocks or a tiny boat… you feel every single little bump. The weather wasn’t even particularly bad, but I started dreading flying through small clouds. I’ve never had motion-sickness of any kind, but I came close on that flight.
When we landed in Medford, we were all a little rumpled, and I was tired and grouchy and hungry on top of all that. It was approaching 14 hours since leaving Fairbanks, and neither of my layovers had been long enough to grab any food. I’d sent a “I’ll be the grouchy short girl in a green shirt with red luggage” text to Ted, the biologist dispatched to pick me up, so he found me without any trouble. My stomach made a very loud and very undignified noise somewhere between Medford and Grants Pass, so we stopped for Taco Bell before heading for the campground.
White Horse Campground is a few minutes outside Grant’s Pass and has played host to the IBP horde for the first two weeks of May for years. The tent village was surprisingly well-organized in a sprawling kind of way. A picnic table at the far end had been turned into a kitchen, one in the middle appeared to be the designated study area, and another closer to the cars (next to a telephone pole that contained several electrical outlets) was the designated electronic devices charging station. It was close to 10pm by that point, so Ted introduced me around and then suggested I get my tent set up and head to bed… wake-up was going to be at 4:30 the next morning. The prospect of pitching an unfamiliar tent in the mostly-dark was a bit daunting, but I got it done and got to bed.
14 May: Grants Pass, OR
4:30am was also mostly-dark and rather chilly, and I used up half of my getting-ready hour just fumbling around my suitcase. I had a headlamp, but that would require more fumbling that could be done after banding when it was light out. I snarfed down a bowl of oatmeal, brewed myself some tea for the road (I’d not seen the light of coffee at that point in my life), and packed my backpack: fanny pack, binoculars,pocket knife, field guide, water, spare socks, lunch, small notebook &writing utensils, gloves, camera. Hair braided, jacket and hat on, hiking boots tied, and I was ready to go.
We piled ten people and their gear into two cars and drove a few miles down the road and into the woods. My social awkwardness dictated that I spent the entire 15-minute drive drinking my tea and not making eye-contact. I couldn't remember any of the names I'd been told the night before, so this was probably just as well. I will note that not making eye-contact with any of four other people in a small sedan when there's no scenery to look at (still dark) is quite a feat. We parked at a pull-out on a gravel road a few miles from the campground, piled out of the car, and proceeded to hike a little way into the trees. Everyone was still too sleepy for much conversation, which was perfectly fine with me. A couple of the boys and the two biologists had a rock-paper-scissors match to decide who had to carry the large and awkward tubs of gear. The sky had been greying up on the ride over and now the landscape was bathed in just enough early light that one could avoid low-hanging branches.
The group immediately split in half to go in two separate directions… Ted was the only person whose name I remembered, so I followed him like a little baby quail. We stopped at a large tree on the far side of a small-ish meadow just as the first birds were starting to chitter at each other. Conversation started up as Ted and the other interns started setting up the banding station. Most of what was directed at me was simple questions about Alaska and my progress on my degree. This was a safe subject, as I was used to these questions and didn't have to put forth much social or mental effort to answer them. It was at this point that I realized that this banding station was very different from the one I was used to. The Fairbanks Creamer's Field banding station comprised of a semi-permanent wall tent on a raised wooden platform, a 'desk' for banding, several tables for additional data collection, chairs, hooks for hanging bird-bags, and a little propane heater that worked 2 days out of every 5. This is the Mercedes of banding stations. The IBP banding station was the used Kia that still runs but has the bare minimum features, isn't much to look at, has a seat spring poking you in the butt and a finicky clutch: a tree and a tarp.
This stylistic difference stemmed mainly from the operational differences between ABO and IBP. The former operated only one largebanding station for a long season (6 months), banding every day. The latter operated on the principle that two interns operate six banding stations at each location, each banding station visited every 10 days for a short season (3 months), using only one 'kit' of equipment for everything. This strategy precludes any structures at all and demands that you bring everything with you and break down or pack out everything at the end of the day, including the nets themselves. The banding kit here looked to be complete with everything we'd need, all packed into a neatly organized tackle box. The nets were in labelledgrocery bags. The 'banding station' was a large blue tarp on the ground, held down against the breeze by our backpacks. I was told that at this location they didn't need to worry about human traffic or vandalism, so the net poles were left in place at the net lanes.
The normal procedure for a station like this (and with 5 people) was to split up the nets in order to get them set up in the shortest amount of time. Ted took me under his wing, picked the closest 2 nets, and headed out. I explained my concerns about the set-up procedural differences, but he seemed unconcerned. I'd actually handled a mist-net before, which put me several steps ahead of the other interns on their first day.
At this point, let me explain a few things about mist-nets. Standard nets are 12 meters in length and 3 meters high, and are generally divided into 4 'pockets' which are held up by 5 trammel lines, each culminating in a loop at each end. These loops are generally strung on a pole and then pushed apart along the length of the pole, 'opening' the net. The poles are supported somehow, either with rebar hammered into the ground (fixed), or with rope secured to a tree or piece of rebar (mobile), or a combination of the two (one fixed end, one mobile end). Most banding stations use some variation on this theme. The poles need to be able to support the net, keep it taught, and keep the whole contraption from falling over when hit by a small- to medium-sized Flying Thing. The net itself is made of a very fine mesh (usually black nylon) of varying sizes... the larger the bird you're targeting, the larger the mesh you need. Passerine (songbird) banding operations typically use 30mm mesh (squares are 15mm to a side, or about the size of a dime). Once set up, these nets can be quite difficult to see head-on, which is fortunate because most birds have eyesight at least as acute as our own; many species have color vision that dips into the ultraviolet. Most banders have had at least a couple of embarrassing “whoa there’s a net there!” moments of not realizing the net exists until it brushes your nose. It’s like walking into a spider web, only less sticky and more mortifying. Buttons and zipper-pulls are the most common ways to catch a human.
The point and purpose to a net of this type (also used to catch bats) is that the Flying Thing hits the net and falls into one of the pockets, where they ideally sit quietly and safely until a Human comes along to extracts it. What actually happens is that the Flying Thing hits the net, falls into the pocket, flails around for 15 or 20 minutes and gets feet, feathers and head tangled up, flails some more when the Human arrives, continues to flail as the Human extracts it, yells a little for good measure, bites the Human a few times, and then usually quiets down when placed in the Warm Dark Place (a cotton bird bag with a drawstring closure) for transport.
So, never having actually attached a net to a set of poles nor, in fact, ever having dealt with a net as an entity separate from its poles... I was a bit clumsy. Ted patiently demonstrated how the white top loop had been twisted through the other four black loops, ensuring that they were all in the correct order. The poles were in two pieces, the bottom of which was slid over a piece of rebar in the ground and held taught with rope tied to whatever was handy. The bottom two loops went on the bottom pole, then the supporting rope, then the top three loops onto the top pole, and finally the top pole popped into the connector atop the bottom pole. With two people, this wasn't as hard as I was anticipating. I learned later that trying to do it by oneself slowed and clumsified the process quite a bit.
With the net open and properly tightened, bottom pocket a safe distance from the ground, grocery bag tied to the bottom of the pole, and numbered clothes-pins clipped to the support ropes on either end (for labelling birds in their bags and securing them to a shirt, jacket, or tree), we headed back to the banding station to wait for the first net-run.
The general rule for checking mist-nets is 30 minutes. There are various circumstances and situations, individual to each banding station and its climate, that could make for shorter or slightly longer net-runs. Nets that are far apart and take a while to check could lead to longer times, as could trying to boost a low capture rate (leave the nets alone longer gives it a better chance of catching something). Longer times must also be balanced with the safety of the birds, e.g. the longer they sit in a net, the more they struggle, the more tangled they get, the more stressed they get, etc. Running the nets more often than 30 minutes could be necessary for lots of reasons, most relating to weather: cold, heat, wind, light rain. Severe occurrences of any of these factors can also lead to closing of the net or the entire station. Shorter net runs can also lower a very high capture rate.
Twenty-ish minutes later, we all set out to check the nets. Ted reminded me as we went along that we needed to make sure to walk the entire length of the net and wiggle the bottom pocket to make sure a bird wasn't camouflaged in the grass or against leaf litter. As we approached the 3rd net on the trail, something small and squirmy caught my eye. Upon closer inspection, it didn't appear very tangled, so Ted had me demonstrate my extraction skills. I quickly assessed which side of the net the bird had flown in from and opened the pocket. Bander's grip to secure the body, untangle the feet, loop the net off of one wing and then the other, gently tug off of the head, and the little guy was free. I squinted at him as I was putting him in the bird bag... I remembered having seen one of these before, but couldn't quite come up with a species name. He was absolutely tiny, had a little black mask on his face, and a bright orange-ish yellow crown on his head.
"So what have we got?" Ted asked as I tied off the bag.
"It's a, uh... baby Golden-Crowned Sparrow?"
Ted raised an eyebrow. "Really? It's only May... babies haven't happened yet. This is a full adult. There are only a few things that are this small. You might have had his red-head cousin up in Alaska."
Light-bulb. Way to make an awesome first impression, dumbass. "It's a kinglet, isn't it."
"Yep."
"Can we pretend the last five minutes never happened?"
Ted laughed. "Don't sweat it. The species are easy, and you know most of them already. You've got the hardest part down... that was a very efficient extraction, nicely done."
**We checked our other net without incident and I successfully extracted two warblers, correctly identifying them as a MacGillivray’s Warbler and a Yellow Warbler.
Back at the banding station, several of the other interns already had birds in various stages of being banded and measured. Most excitingly, a tall blond girl was wrestling a Western Scrub-Jay from its bag. I say ‘wrestle’ because the bird was large-ish (almost too big for her hand, and therefore difficult to control), squirmy, and had a big wad of the bag in its feet… and showed no signs of wanting to let go. When she finally got it away from him, he yelled loudly about it. She found him a stick to hold instead and that seemed to quiet him down. As soon as the excitement was over (several photos later), Ted and I sat down on an unused piece of tarp and commandeered a banding kit and data binder. He handed me several data keys in plastic page protectors, indicating that these were the abbreviations they used when collecting various bits of information. The hardest part about switching agencies is learning a new set of data codes… every agency has its own system. The concept is the same, but some groups use letters, some use numbers, some use 5 categories for one characteristic while others only use 3, etc. ABO had used number codes for everything, while IBP (I discovered) used letters for some things and numbers for others. Numbers are easier to sort in a spreadsheet on a computer, but letters are easier to use and remember in the field because they stand for words. It took a while before I could wean myself away from the cheat-sheet with the codes all written out.Generally, the data sheets are organized in the order in which you take the measurements. The standard measurements and characteristics are usually on the front of the page, and a space for notes and species-specific measurements on the back. The spreadsheets are generally crowded and complicated, so fewer mistakes get made if you can just enter the data in its logical order across a horizontal row.
Under normal circumstances, the process of banding a bird and taking down a set of standardized measurements takes about 3 minutes if you’re good and the bird isn’t something weird. If you’re just learning or the bird is one that isn’t familiar to you, it can take up to 10 minutes.Many species have their own set of 1 to 5 measurements or characteristics that can help age or sex that particular species and if you’re not familiar with those off the top of your head, looking them up can take a few minutes. Under extreme circumstances (very cold, a female on the verge of laying an egg, very high capture rate) when the bird needs to be released as soon as possible, a band is put on, minimal data is taken (age and sex only), and the bird is released… this can be done in 1 minute for an experienced bander on a familiar species. If the species has very clear age- and sex-related plumage, it can be done even quicker.
I’ll go through the process here, but it’s much easier to understand if you actually see it done… I’m sure there are several YouTube videos out there that would be helpful with this.
The first thing that has to happen is getting the bird out of the bag. Getting him in there was relatively easy… getting him out again can range from feel-feel-grab to feel-feel-ow-ow-ouchie-grab-escape-feel-grab-ouchie. Next, species and sometimes subspecies is determined. Usually this is a simple, instantaneous one-glance thing. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it requires 3 different field guides, 3 different humans, and 20 measurements (the Empidonax flycatchers are notorious for this). But species has to be determined before a band can be put on the bird, however much effort that might take. This is for two reasons: mostly it ensures that every bird flying around with a band on its leg has been identified, but also different species need different band sizes. For the most part, if two species are close enough in appearance that you can’t tell which one you have in your hand, they will take the same size band… but you never know.
Band size is very important. Too small and it won’t slide freely on the bird’s leg and will rub a raw spot, too big and it will fall off. Standard-issue bands for small birds are made of light-weight aluminium and are simply an open cylinder. The cylinder is pried open, the bird’s leg set inside, and then pried closed again. For large powerful birds like raptors, bands made of a stronger metal or with a different clasping mechanism are used so the bird can’t crush the band or bite through it. Bands are issued by the USGS and are designed so that its weight doesn’t affect the flight of the bird wearing it. They each have a unique 9-digit number that, when entered into the national database, will be associated with that bird and all its measurements for the rest of its life. Banding is basically an extended mark-recapture study and can be used in a diverse array of population studies.
So, after species is determined, band size is assessed. If the bird already has a band (a recapture), the number is noted. If the bird is a species that our specific banding permit doesn’t include, the bird is marked on a datasheet as ‘unbanded’. All the same data is taken, but no physical band is applied. Hummingbirds, for example, require a special permit and special bands, and game birds (anything that can be hunted for food or sport) are handled by the Department of Fish & Game, since hunters are pretty good about reporting bands on the birds they kill. Most species have one appropriate band size. Some have two or even three if the leg sizes are variable. A tool very like a ring-sizer at a jewellery store in practice (not in appearance) is used in this case to determine which size should be used. This leg-gauge is usually a flat piece of metal with different sized labelled notches in the sides. Band sizes go from 0A at the smallest to 9 at the largest. Our small, portable, song-bird-geared kit only contained up to size 3. The letters after the numbers were assigned in the order they were invented, not size order, so they go: 0A, 0, 1, 1B, 1A, 2, 3.
So, we’ve determined what size band the bird needs. The old-style plastic film canister (which are getting to be a rare commodity these days) that contains that size band needs to be fished out of the kit, which is sometimes harder than you might think especially with only one hand. The next band on the string is pulled off and its number recorded. The USGS requires a report on every single band used. This means that even if a band is destroyed or lost, which happens sometimes, every band hasto be given an accounting code indicating how it was used (normal, lost, destroyed, replaced, etc.). Special pliers, shown below with other common banding kit tools, are used to first pry open the band, apply it to the bird’s leg, and then pry it shut. Ideally this is done so that the numbers are right-side-up but newbies like I was often get this wrong, to the annoyance of the banders who may recapture the bird in the future. Having to contort one’s head to read an upside-down band isn’t fun and is usually the source of some mild swearing.
Let me interject here about how this is all accomplished with only two hands and ten fingers. Fine manual dexterity is a must… anyone who has played a wind or string instrument or the piano comes pre-trained in the use of all the fingers in unusual ways. You’d be surprised how many non-musician banders get cramps in their pinkies and ring fingers or can’t get them to move independently. At a small operation like IBP, where 2 people operate the whole station, each person has to be a completely independent bander and scribe, which means being pretty ambidextrous. Hold the bird in one hand, and write, band, and otherwise manipulate the bird with the other. Also, it only takes two fingers to hold a calm bird… that’s three free fingers (including the thumb) on one hand that can be useful… this is especially important in the process of opening and manipulating the band. You have to be able to hold the pliers and the band at the same time.
Anyway, after the band is safely on the bird’s leg, all the metadata has to be recorded. This includes the capture time, date, and net number. A code for the band use (normal, lost destroyed, etc.) and bird status is also recorded. The bird status can include several things, most of them not good. One code stands for a normal healthy bird and all the others cover various ailments, including death. Thankfully, these codes aren’t used very often. The most common are ‘stress’ and ‘wing strain’.
Now we’re to the actual measurement part. The first set of three biometrics are done together: brood patch, cloacal protuberance, and fat deposition. This requires blowing the feathers out of the way so you can see the translucent skin of the bird’s abdomen. A brood patch is when a (usually) female bird will pluck the feathers on her abdomen in preparation for incubating eggs. The skin will also swell with fluid to allow efficient heat-transfer. This is immediately apparent upon blowing on the feathers of the abdomen: a big huge naked belly. In most species, a brood patch is an instant indicator of an adult female bird. A cloacal protuberance is when a male’s cloaca (the reptile catch-all urogenital and rectal opening) swells in preparation for mating. As with the brood patch, a large cloacal protuberance in an instant indicator of an adult male. Unfortunately, these are breeding characteristics so if you’re banding sometime other than late spring and summer, you’re out of luck. The other thing you can see if you blow the feathers of the abdomen out of the way is fat deposition. Generally birds store metabolic fat in what’s called the furcular hollow. This is the equivalent of the hollow between your collar bones (the bird collar bones are called furcula). Orangey-yellow fat stands out from the pink muscle around it. Birds start putting on fat in late summer in preparation for migration.
The next biometric took some practice, several seasons’ worth in fact. If the bird’s age can’t be reliably determined by the BP, CP, or the general look of the bird’s plumage, looking at the skull can solve the mystery. In general terms, ‘age’ just means a juvenile, sub-adult, or adult. Anything more specific than that is called ‘micro-ageing’ and has to be determined by very specific feather characteristics. When a bird hatches, the two layers of its skull are separate. As it grows over the next year or so, those two layers fuse together gradually. Vertical pillars of bone tissue grow between the layers, connecting them. A bander can see these pillars through the nearly-transparent skin as tiny white dots. The extent of these dots tells the bander how complete the oscification is and therefore how old the bird is. A fully oscified skull (dots all over) indicates an adult, while a partially oscified skull (no dots or dots only in a few areas) indicates a juvenile or sub-adult. Unfortunately, depending on how transparent the individual bird’s skin is, these dots can be difficult or impossible to see. Birds like woodpeckers have so much muscle on their heads and necks that the skull can’t be seen. Other birds have black skin, which also makes skulling impossible. Luckily, most of the species for which skulling doesn’t work have other characteristics that give away their age.
Another important measurement is the length of the wing. Sometimes this can differentiate between male and female. In some species, taking a tail measurement is important as well, but it generally isn’t done unless it’s necessary.
The last set of standard biometrics is all about the feathers themselves. First, any juvenal feathers are recorded as a percentage. Next, the shape of the tips of the outer wing feathers (primaries) and tail feathers (rectrices) is recorded. Adults tend to have squared-off, truncate feathers, while juveniles tend to have very pointy feathers. The wear on these main flight feathers is also recorded. Lastly, any molt occurring is categorized and recorded. Birds replace all of their feathers all at once, once a year (generally in the fall right before migration), and adults do it in a different pattern than juveniles. There is a whole science behind how it’s possible to differentiate between a second-year bird and a third-year bird using these molt patterns… this is the basis of micro-ageing.
Species- and group-specific biometrics can vary from the length of a crown patch to eye color. Feather patterns can tell a male from a female, and bill-length and feather emargination can help with species identification. Any species in which there is a male-to-female gradient on some characteristic, there is a measurement to quantify it. For example: an adult male Wilson’s Warbler has a jet-black crown patch, whereas the females and young males have a greenish patch with maybe a few black feathers. In these guys we measure the black crown (if present) and estimate the percent saturation of the black. Google them, they’re adorable.
The last measurement taken is mass. A small and highly accurate scale is used, as well as some unorthodox methods for getting birds to sit still enough to weigh. Usually, a cup of some kind (film canisters, cut-off shampoo bottles, short length of PVC pipe, etc.) is used to immobilize the bird. The bird is inserted into the cup and stood on its head on the scale. This looks ridiculous, but is safe for the bird and a lot less headache for the bander. After a mass reading is taken, the bird is scooted out of the cup and released.
I apologize for the technical tangent, but this was my 2-day crash-course in bird banding. I had seen all these things done but had never done it myself, and just understanding the information behind things like micro-ageing took a while. Learning to understand and use the bander’s ‘bible’ (Peter Pyle’s Identification Guide to North American Birds, Part 1), which I will go into later, was also an interesting experience that took several seasons of squinting and re-reading. If you’re a bander or a well-informed birder and already know all this stuff, feel free to skip these bits. I won’t be offended. I just don’t want to drop a bunch of bio-jargon on any non-science-inclined folks who happen to read this.
Ted and I did several more net runs and extractions that first day, and banded several more birds. By the end of the day, the process and hand movements were getting more familiar and less clumsy, which I counted as a success. When you’re getting up an having breakfast at 4:00am, lunch happens around 10:00am. Most people, myself included, had packed a sandwich or something like it. Most of us had also packed one other non-sandwich thing (carrots, nuts, crackers, grapes, etc.), and these were placed in the middle of the tarp to be fair game for anyone. By this point in the morning, the dawn rush was over and birds were coming slowly enough that we could eat out sandwiches comfortably and graze on other things the rest of the morning. I was also gradually getting to know the other interns. Most were college students majoring in some kind of biology-related science, just like me, so there was common ground for conversation. This fact made my social awkwardness a good deal less debilitating and a good deal less obvious. Turns out, I could talk about classes and professors and labs with complete strangers without much trouble.
By the end of the day, we were all well into the end-of-field-day mentality of “I reeeally need to get out of my hiking boots and let my toes roam free”. Back at camp, the two interns whose turn it was to cook dinner went off to take stock of community groceries and make a list for going into town. I went into my tent and, now with full daylight, reorganized my things so that I wouldn’t have to dig for them in the 4am dark. Then, once the groceries pair returned from town, we all sat down at a picnic table for some learnin’.
Ted and Tim were going over bird life-history as it related to ageing, bird years, and molts. The easiest way to explain this is to provide the diagram that they drew (see below). It took a minute to wrap my head around some of these concepts, but once I drew the diagram for myself a few times, it started to make sense. After staring at the diagram for a while, the concept of ageing birds by molt and plumage started to make sense too, based on the fact that some of the molts are incomplete. After an incomplete molt, some of the old feathers will still be there, and they won’t look as new and shiny as the ones that have been replaced… they might even be a completely different color than the new feathers. This concept is how birds get micro-aged. A ‘molt-limit’ (a term that would become our nemesis) is the boundary between two different generations of feathers, new and old. Seeing these boundaries is the bane of every young bander on the planet. You keep ‘seeing’ them everywhere… and then you finally see a real one and it all makes sense. Understanding the standard life-history model and age nomenclature also helped us to understand the Pyle Guide. You can’t read a single sentence without stumbling over one of the terms in the diagram below.
Ageing and sexing birds is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You grab the low-hanging fruit first: find the corner pieces and assemble the edges. Then you start piecing together small bits of information that don’t mean much by themselves, but you can get a pretty complete picture by putting lots of those small bits together. Unless the small bits all point in different directions. Then you’re screwed.
After the lecture, we had a lovely dinner of make ‘em yourself tacos and beer, sat by the campfire for a bit while Ted played guitar, and then went to bed when the mosquitoes came out.
15 May: Grants Pass, OR
I stupidly thought that 4:30am would be less jolting the second morning. It wasn’t. But I’d found my headlamp the previous afternoon, so getting ready wasn’t nearly as clumsy. I ate a granola bar while my tea steeped and while everyone else brewed their coffee and tried not to fall asleep on my feet. Clearly, it would take a bit longer for my internal clock to adjust itself.
**We were going to the other banding site today, the last day of training. We also had to take down all the poles and pack them out with us to be sent with one of the crews for the season. This made for a long-ish day, but we were all pretty excited about getting our assignments that night, so nobody minded much. We got everything set up and I tagged along with two of the interns for the first net run. Nothing too exciting, a few sparrows and MacGillivray’s Warblers, but another pair came back with a Bullock’s Oriole and Ted came back with a bag and a huge grin.
Everyone wanted whatever was in Ted’s bag, so we did the pick-a-number game. Twenty-three. Prime numbers do it every time. He told me that we had to wait and do all the other birds first. If you ever want to motivate young banders to move quickly, Mystery Bird In A Bag is a huge freaking carrot. We finished with the sparrows and warblers in record time, took photos of the pretty oriole, and then everyone turned and stared at me.
“If you accidentally let it go, no one will ever speak to you again… just in case you were wondering. No pressure or anything,” one of the other interns said wryly.
“I’m good with that,” I replied as I opened the bag and gingerly reached in. I had learned about birds and biting with a Black-Headed Grosbeak that one of the boys handed to me yesterday without warning me, so my teeth were pre-emptively gritted just in case.
The Flying Thing didn’t bite me, but it also didn’t feel like anything I could identify. Sparrows are medium-sized and stout, warblers are small and delicate, kinglets are tiny, grosbeak things are large-ish and bite, robins are large and loud, woodpeckers are loud and peck, etc. This was medium-sized and seemed to have no neck, no feet, and no tail. When I finally pulled it out, I started. It basically had no neck, feet, or tail, and was iridescent brownish-blue on top and white on bottom. It had a tiny bill and long pointy wings.
I grinned and held it up. “How often do you catch these?” I asked.
Ted returned the grin amid ooh’s and ahh’s. “Almost never. They’re certainly around, we see them all the time. But their eyesight is so good that they see the nets. And usually they’re flying up too high anyway. We got lucky with this one. She probably isn’t the cream of the intellectual crop, if you know what I mean.”
It was a Tree Swallow, a young female who wasn’t the deep cerulean blue of an adult yet. Her wings extended out past her stumpy tail, and she basically had feet with no legs. Banding her (which requires a leg) was interesting. We got it done, but I had to dig around on her belly to grab a foot and pull it away from her. Here she is (right), along with an adult male for comparison (left).
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