Numbers of birds and species diversity this week stayed consistent with last week's totals, despite only banding on five days this week.  This was due in large part to Sunday's banding efforts, which netted us 240 birds with the fewest number of trap hours all week.  No new species were added this week, but White-throated Sparrow numbers increased, taking first place with 149 banded (74 of which were from Sunday's totals).  Yellow-rumped Warblers fell to second (84), Song Sparrow came in third (68), and Ruby-crowned Kinglet came in fourth (61).  Mike Comley, Randi Gerrish, Brian Jones, Carroll Labarthe, Trish Miller-Lanzone, Molly McDermott, Joe Schreiber (a visiting bander friend from Maryland), and Matt Shumar all helped with banding this week.

• With the sparrow and finch season upon us, walking up to a net and seeing a small, bright yellow bird has become a few-and-far-between experience lately.  So, our 28th Nashville Warbler for the season, this adult male banded on Tuesday, October 19, certainly brightened our day.

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• As a general rule, hatching year and second year (before their second prebasic molt) Purple Finches cannot be sexed because males have "delayed plumage maturation" and do not acquire their characteristic raspberry purple color until after their second, or definitive, prebasic molt.  Even so, some young males are precocious in showing some purple color in their first basic plumage.  The fact, then, that the bird in the picture below, banded on Thursday, October 21, was an adult, makes it that much easier to sex, right?

• If you said female......you were right, a very bright female, but undeniably so (compare with the adult male banded last week).  As mentioned above however, there is the occasional case where a young male can develop particularly bright plumage that would closely resemble this adult female, bringing us, yet again, to the importance of correctly ageing a bird before attempting to determine its sex.

• And, just to show that we don't cast some magical spell on the birds we band at Powdermill to make them pose so nicely for pictures, here is one of our attempts at photographing the Purple Finch above.  This picture also shows why Purple Finches are unaffectionately called, among many banders, 'Purple Pinches.'

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• Banded on Friday, October 22nd, was our 8th Carolina Wren for the season, a strikingly beautiful hatching year bird in very fresh first basic plumage.

• A species whose winter range extends through Powdermill and even northward into the Great Lakes region, the Carolina Wren is sensitive to extremely cold temperatures.  Because of this, during harsh winters, the northern population of CARW's periodically dies off.  The graph below shows the annual fall banding totals  of CARW captures at Powdermill.  The fluctuations are evidence of this periodic population crash and recovery in response to years with harsh winters at Powdermill.  The bitter cold temperatures we experienced much of last Jan. and Feb. are reflected in this fall's low total of only eight birds.  Note that even in "crash" years, fall banding totals very rarely dropped to zero.

 

 
 
 

More information on this topic can be found at http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/carolinaWren.html

• The first White-crowned Sparrows for the fall (banded last week) were juvenals, so when we finally captured an adult, in its unequivocal plumage, we couldn't help but take a picture.  This bird was one of three banded on our 240 bird Sunday.

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Finally, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves with the photo below because the bird was actually caught on Wed. Oct. 27 of the current banding week, but we just couldn't pass up the opportunity to wish everybody........

Happy OWL-oween!
 

We've just gone batty!

We were reminded Friday afternoon when we found this silver-haired bat in our parking lot, that birds, of course, are not the only animals migrating this time of year.  Despite its weak condition, it still managed to bear its fangs and hiss intimidatingly at us.  After offering it some water and placing it on the side of our warm wooden barn, it showed signs of improvement and crawled high into a corner of the barn to roost.  Happily, the next morning, it was gone, hopefully continuing on its solitary journey to the southern U.S.  The End

Last Updated on 10/29/04
By Adrienne J. Leppold