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.