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.