POWDERMILL NATURE RESERVE
PICTORIAL HIGHLIGHTS
October 28-November 3, 2002
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Friday-Sunday, November 1-3, 2002:
Rain
delayed the start of banding on Friday and greatly limited our banding
effort that day; very cold (below freezing) early morning temperatures
and windy conditions on Saturday also led to much lower than usual banding
effort; it was calm and clear, but very cold overnight on Saturday, when
we opened a few nets for owl banding, and there was a heavy frost on Sunday
morning. It remained cool, but bright and sunny, all day Sunday.
Over the weekend Carroll
Labarthe,
Darlene
Madarish,
Adrienne
Leppold,
Brian
Jones,
Bonnie,
Robert,
and Mead Mulvihill,
and Mary Helen Chiodo
all helped with the banding and also with a very special project on Sunday
celebrating the 8th birthday of our good friend Maeve
Hoffstot (who likes toucans!)
Maeve and Friends
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Over the course of the last three banding days
of the week, we banded 152 birds of 17 species, one of these being new
for the fall. With these additions, we moved past 5,000 birds
banded for the season, and our species count moved to 104. The new
bird was caught after dark on Saturday...
Brian Jones
braved the frosty night
(not too long after braving his last Frostburg
mid-term!)
and finally got his owl!
Specifically, the first Northern
Saw-whet Owl of
the season--a tiny
hatching year male (MUCH smaller than the
picture below!)
Back at the banding lab, this one little owl
put a pretty
big smile on the faces of Bob
Leberman and Adrienne
Leppold!
(but Saw-whet
Owls tend to have that effect on people!)
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Wednesday-Thursday, October 30-31,
2002: Rainy, windy, cold conditions
limited the banding effort on Wednesday (there was a severe ice storm at
higher elevations overnight on Tuesday); weather Thursday was much more
agreeable, even becoming partly sunny and almost mild in the afternoon.
Darlene
Madarish helped with the banding on Wednesday
and Adrienne Leppold
helped on Thursday.
-
American Goldfinches,
with 65 banded in the last two days, are the top species so far this week,
with Dark-eyed Juncos
a distant second (two day total of 33). Best bird starting
out the banding week was an American Woodcock,
our first for the fall. The bird was a large hatching year (HY) female
(like many shorebirds, this species shows reversed sexual size dimorphism,
with the females being larger, on average, than the males).
In the top photo below the dried mud along
the bird's bill betrays its habit of probing deep into soft, wet ground
for worms and other invertebrate prey; in the bottom photo (taken by Darlene
Madarish) we tried to emphasize the bird's unusual top- and rear-set eyes,
which give it an excellent field of view above and behind. This adaptation
gives the AMWO
an advantage in terms of keeping an eye out for predators that can attack
from above while it probes for food on the ground below. Recent foraging
for this particular bird must have been very successful--it had moderate
fat deposits ("2" on our scale of 0-3) and weighed 228.7 grams, making
it the heaviest AMWO
out of >60 banded here in fall (only two others have exceeded 200g)!
Only one other AMWO
in our database weighed more (234.2g) and that was a gravid (egg-bearing)
female in spring. Its also our fourth latest fall banding date (the
latest was banded on 11/4/79).
-
Before Thursday, all of the few White-crowned
Sparrows we'd banded this fall had been brown-crowned
HY birds. Below is a photo of our first black-and-white striped adult
WCSP
of the season.
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