We spent the early morning hours on Saturday with Georgia's IBA (Important Bird Area) Coordinator and some of his volunteers. They were out at
Panola Mountain State Park to band sparrows.
We met before the sun was up and were pleased to see and hear American Woodcock doing their flight display over the grassy fields of Panola.
Here birdy, birdy...
I'm not sure how much you all know about how birds are caught and banded, so I played Kenny Kodak and took pictures of the process to make myself feel useful. I'm a bit too squeamish about it to actually handle the birds myself...
Mist nests are erected in likely habitat and then checked by volunteers every thirty minutes.
Removing birds from the nets is a very delicate process. Volunteers are trained over the course of years to learn how it's done.
The birds are then placed in soft cotton bags until they're processed by the bander.
As a side note... a couple years ago
at Jekyll Island, where Charlie also bands birds, they did a study of the droppings left in the bags in order to better understand what specific plants birds were making use of in the local habitat. Neat, huh?!?
A bucket o' birds!
This is
my favorite part of the banding process... Charlie is blowing air on the bird's keel to check for fat... you can actually see the fat deposited there when the feathers are blown out of the way. He rates the amount of fat each bird has and records it, along with the expected info like weight, wing measurements, sex, signs of molt and how much the flight feathers are worn down. The band number is recorded and the bird is set to fly away, back to its weedy patch of home.
Another quiz!
We have the idea that going to these banding sessions might actually help us learn to better identify sparrows, but I'm not so sure. Even though I know these are two different varieties of sparrow, I can hardly recognize the field marks that differentiate them! Anyone care to guess?
The morning wasn't all about LBJ's though...
Eye candy!
Bags and bucket in hand, the volunteers head back to check the nets again...
7 comments:
I was thinking (l to r) Swamp and Song, but the beak on the right one is bicolored -- Songies don't have a bicolored bill. I got no clue. But I do feel relatively sure on the Swampie?
Delia: I think you're right... at least that's what the bander said... Song and Swamp. I'm not sure about the funny-colored bill... maybe a juvi?
OK. I'm with you on the squeamish business. Truly. I understand the these studies are useful . . but at Magee Marsh last spring, it was tough watching those sacks of hapless warblers lying around the demonstration tent.
That eye candy . . . whaaat ?
Blue-headed grosbeak?
OK. It's been a loong day . . it's a bluebird?
I'm baaaaack . . . ;)
It's a Blue Grosbeak.
I'm going to bed now before I completely humiliate myself.
Sorry Cathy... it's a bluebird! Blue grosbeak's have a lot more brown on their backs, I think.
Ah well.
I plead fatigue. It couldn't be rusty birding skills :)
I opened a cupboard door this afternoon to grab a cup.
Found a half gallon of milk I'd apparently put in there this AM.
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