Gotta Catch'em All

This Painted Bunting, a common backyard
visitor, is molting his headplumage.

All birders like to look at birds. Casual birders will buy a cheap pair of binoculars and take them on walks or hikes and more often than not, see some birds they've seen before. Taking a moment to inspect wild animals with a closer view can help one to appreciate another side of their multifaceted lives. One may see that the spectacular Painted Bunting they have seen at their backyard feeders all summer, are now molting their feathers and look completely ridiculous. On the other hand, there are hardcore birders. The revelations that surprise a casual birder are the lifeblood of a devoted bird watcher. Indeed, to be an exceptional birder, one must observe avian life in as many states as possible and must be sure to take careful notes, even photographs and sketches (oldschool, but still around). A hardcore birder keeps an ear to the ground using websites like eBird or word of mouth and may travel some hours before reaching the location at which their target was last seen. If they are patient and lucky, the trip will be fruitful. If not, the target bird may be dubbed a "nemisis" bird. The bird that always seems to elude the observer.

I fall in the middle of these two categories. True, my resume is studded with titles like "Avian Field Technician" and "Seasonal Avian Biologist," but it hasn't given me the OOMPH to drive 3 hours away to find a White Ibis in its non-traditional range. The truth is, I enjoy sitting back and letting the birds come to me. This fall at the Kiawah Island Banding Station, I have the opportunity to catch many birds which are unique to this migration corridor. My experiences with fall migration in Indiana and spring migration in Texas overlap a little with my current position, but I'll be catching many birds that hug the coastline to make their trip across or around the Gulf of Mexico. I'll be catching a lot of birds that I've never seen before.

This Cape May Warbler is a nemesis bird for at least
one bander...

I can't jump the gun and call them "lifers" though. That is a specific term for the first time in an individual's life that s/he has seen or heard that bird in the wild. Instead, I'll be catching what the technicians at the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory call "fondles" (Get ready for many odd-sounding sentences). A fondle is the term for the first time in an individual's life that s/he has handled a bird species. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, I might be lucky enough to see a bird, but not have handled one. After all, passive mist-netting, while full of surprises, is biased toward the birds that utilize the habitat ie. two meters from the ground in a heavily vegetated area. Mist-nets don't catch very many soaring Turkey Vultures. Secondly, mist-netting is CHEATING when considering life birds. I consider myself very lucky to be able to travel the country and get paid to play with birdies. But if I take away the nets, it would be much more difficult for me to see these creatures with any regularity. They can be sneaky, quiet, and generally do not want to be seen by the likes of me. Although my lifers and my fondles overlap greatly, I would be lying if I said I've seen every bird that I've caught in a net in it's natural pose.

One of the neat things about "catching
them all" is collecting both sexes of the
same species. Male Black-throated Blue Warbler

Female Black-throated Blue Warbler.
What a lovely contrast.

I am lucky enough to have traveled and worked so extensively as to have a long list of lifers AND fondles. In fact, even though I was born and raised in the Bay Area, my western fondles are quite low. Since most of my work has been out east, my number is greater. I am happy to expand upon both lists. One is easier to do than the other, since I can add to lifers until I die. My fondles will probably apex when I go graduate school or leave the banding station work in general. Until then, I'll thank my lucky stars to have such an awesome job catching and playing with birdies.

Bushfort Banding Station

Battery Davis, before the dogs

I never had a treehouse when I was young. I usually had to find an alcove in a complex of bushes in one of San Francisco's many public parks. Sometimes I could squeeze into a space that wasn't really there, but more often than not, the path had been tread before. A combination of the city's many children and many hobos forged these clandestine, bushy hideaways. For the moments that I was there, they were my treehouses - or bushforts, I guess. As the park did not belong to me or my family, and was often far away from home, I couldn't customize my bushfort like one may customize a treehouse. I had no battery-clock on the wall, no stash of comic books, no "gurlz not allowd" sign to decorate my hiding spot with. At the end of the day, I would go home. The next day I would find another hiding spot in a different park, all the while archiving the location of my bushforts in my memory. For next time. I have been lucky enough to revisit some of these spots as an adult, just to see if I could still fit through the corridors. But alas, I have never had a treehouse to call my own.

Recently, I have discovered a new form of treehouse - the banding station. The banding station is an avian technician's secret, outdoor hideaway where we process birds we catch in our mist nets. It must have specific accommodations for us to store, handle, band, and measure our subjects. There are four things that are key to any banding station setup: space, shelter, hooks, and tools.

There are many people that work in a banding station, performing many activities simultaneously, so there must be adequate space to conduct work in. Four meters by four meters on (mostly) level ground is more than enough room. Some stations are remote and can be comprised of a tarp on the ground with all the people and tools sitting on top. Others are more accessible and can have tables, chairs, even overhead lights to make banding day more comfortable. Shelter is another consideration that makes banding more comfortable, even cushy. When on a tarp in the middle of the woods, if it begins to rain we must close up our nets and pack everything away. Hopefully we have selected a spot under some tall, leafy trees to keep us dry while we get ready to leave. If not, WARNING - banders irritable when wet! Some established banding stations, on the other hand, are located under tarps and gazebos or inside cabins and trailers, making a rainy day less of an ordeal. Stations located in buildings with climate control are downright luxurious.

Hooks are essential in the transportation and temporary storage of birds. When birds are extracted from the nets, they are placed in a cloth bag, aptly called a "bird bag", which should be a warm, sightless environment. I believe birds are calmer in the opaque bags, than they would be if they had to helpless watch a few giant monsters grapple with their comrades. Bird bags can be purchased from birding suppliers or sewn together from old pillowcases. After a bird is deposited in the bag, the drawstring at the top is cinched and loosely knotted to prevent the bird from escaping. What is left of the drawstring can be hung around limbs, both human and arboreal, caribiners, or coathooks, depending on your setting and protocol. Some operations are bare-bones and bird bags are carried around on our wrists until we arrive at the station and can hang them from a nearby tree. This method, while acceptable, requires constant vigilance and safety checks to make sure every bird is accounted for.Other operations have stricter protocol and require bags to be carried only on a necklace with a caribiner on it, later to be left at the designated place at the banding station. The reason for this is that carelessness may result in bird injury or death. It would be TERRIBLE if a bird in a bag was forgotten or misplaced. Banding stations that are inside, or highly customized outdoor stations, may have caribiners or coathooks in the processing area that can help with organizing the birds that are caught. Birds can be separated by condition, n00b/recapture status, or even rarity. The birds can be left in the bag for up to two hours (there are different opinions and circumstances that cause this value to vary) until the time they are processed.

The final element in operating a banding station is variety of tools that are used. A typical MAPS station includes USGS bands, color bands, banding pliers, wing rulers, calpers, a magnifying glass or optical lens, a scale, weighing tubes, a thermometer, a clock, a pocket knife (with scissors and a toothpick), a Pyle Guide, and additional bird identification literature. There can be many sizes for some of the tools, like the banding pliers, and a station can have multiple sets of tools so technicians can work simultaneously. Many of the tools are similar from operation to operation but different brands can be used. For instance, the best banding pliers in the world used to be produced by one man. He stopped producing them and now the new generation of pliers, while functional, cannot open bands as smoothly, or close them as flush as the originals. Banders with the privilege to use the former are always cautioned to protect and care for them with their LIVES.

With all of these factors in mind, you can see how many different types of banding operations can be run. Indeed, banders from across the states share notes, reminisce, or tell horror stories of the many styles of banding station at which they have worked. I, myself, started in the most basic of styles, tarp on the ground, trees used for shelter and hooks, equipment ferried in and out, day after day. I have been lucky enough to work in a heated trailer with fixed work stations, everything I needed just an arm's reach away. Currently, my work station is a jumble of both worlds. The station is located outside, on higher ground than the rest of the surrounding marsh, under the shade of several pine trees. We have two tables, some chairs, and some basic gear that remain there, stored under a tarp every night. We carry the expensive, hard to replace stuff in and out with us. We have a structure constructed out of pipes and screws that is rigged with about twenty caribiners, from which we hang our bird bags, as well as two beverage holders. The finishing touch is the clock that hangs from a branch of the largest pine tree. This banding station is completely the vision of Aaron, my boss. This banding station is his treehouse.

While a banding station is technically my place of work, it never fails to stir up old memories of the bushforts I played in as a child. I feel a similar sense of security, adventure, and imagination. One day I'll have my own banding station, perhaps even establish one myself, from scratch. I will be free to customize my work space exactly as I see fit. Maybe instead of a clock on a tree branch, I'll hang a picture of Fort Funston. It will serve to remind me how far I have come and, in one respect, how little I have grown up.

Nest Frustration and Target Netting

6APR2012 Friday

Lately I’ve been on a plot with Steven. He’s a good birding buddy. We communicate well about our efforts and sightings, which makes our efforts much more concentrated. That being said, it’s been really hard finding nests. Many of the birds are incubating, which means they rarely move off their nests. Quiet and stationary birds make for vexing work. I invited Becky to team up with me to find a nest that had been eluding me and guess what. She found it on her own in 30 minutes. I hadn’t even been looking in that area. I had only seen the female on the slope and not on the mesa top. I should have looked all over the territory instead of looking at the same spot over and over again, even if I had seen the female there. She doesn’t always have to be near her nest.

 Banding birds has gotten a bit frustrating as of late. They haven’t been engaging with my audio playback, and that’s probably because it sounds fake. The target netting procedure is essentially the same as passive netting, except it is mobile. I keep the equipment in the back of my truck and take it out when I’m looking to catch a bird. We try to only catch unbanded males, since catching a female may result in her being away from her nest too long. In addition to the net equipment, I have audio equipment that I use to play audio recordings of GCWAs. I have one small speaker tucked away in the vegetation on either side of the net, and I hook them up to my mp3 player. The sound of another male inside of an individual’s territory is infuriating to a GCWA, and if I’m lucky they’re waste no time to say so. They fly toward the sound, at which point I switch the speaker the audio is coming out of until he  bumps into my net and gets stuck. Then I run out, extract him, apply his bands, take morphometric data, and let him go. Now we can identify which individual he is. Sometimes the birds are reluctant to get caught, so we have a secret weapon. We have a recording of an Eastern Screech Owl that we play to really catch their attention. The only problem is that it catches the attention of every other bird in the vicinity. Song birds have evolved a common tendency to mob predators such as raptors and this behavior is even stronger around nests during breeding season. When I play this call, I can catch male and female GCWAs, more than my fair share of cardinals, White-eyed Vireos, Painted Buntings, and lots of other small song birds. Once again, it’s a last resort for when the individual in question seems uninterested with confronting my speakers.

 I’ve caught and banded four birds so far. I’ve given most of them names. There’s Snowball II, a second year female who is nesting currently, Donatello (he had ninja turtle bands!), Peadar (Irish color bands), and one which I forgot to name, but is certainly kicking butt around his area. I followed “Peadar” around his neck of the woods around Northmost trail. His female popped up, so I followed her as long as I could through the thick brush and juniper. She didn’t do much though. Then I lost her. After lunch I tried again. I found Peadar and checked where I had seen the female. No luck. I had lost my map from my cargo pant pocket after trying to retrieve my GPS without looking from that same pocket so I could keep my eye on the bird. I retraced my steps and found it, no thanks to my GPS which refuses to cooperate under dense foliage.

So that was my day. No nests so far, but I banded a bird. I returned to the office for the weekly team meeting. At team meetings we discuss what we did and learned on our subplots that week so that we hit the ground running when we rotate sites. What new birds are there? Are there any unbanded males? What new nests were found? What leads do you have on possible nests? That last one is the kicker. I shouldn’t feel so bad because we work as a team, but it does hurt a little to forfeit your opportunity to find a nest when you worked so hard to get that information. I keep it in perspective. This is a group project, not a competition. Next week I’ll be on a new subplot with new opportunities and new bird personalities, so it’s a whole new ballgame.

Avian Locations

18MAR2012 Sunday

The Golden-cheek Warblers are here now so this week I got to finish up flagging point count routes and get to work bird dogging. Bird dogging is what Doug calls chasing banded birds, taking avian locations, and trying to find nests. It’s difficult work, but what a fun challenge! I listen for the male GCWA to sing and then I head in his direction. He can usually be found at the top of a cedar elm, cedar ash, or juniper tree singing his head off. When I find him, I try to catch a glimpse of his color bands and get a GPS location. The point is to stick with him long enough so that his mate stops by and then I try to follow her to a nest that she’s building or built. That’s the harder part, since she doesn’t sing. If I’m lucky she makes chipping noises, but those can be confused with chipping noises of other females and… cardinals.

When I’m chasing a male the song can sound close enough to follow, but I end up running down a gulley and back up the other side, just to find that he bugs out the moment I get him in my sights and he flies back across the gulley. It’s hard to get a good reading on the bands right away for several reasons. The bands can be backlit, they can look similar to each other (Dark blue and black! Pink and orange! Green and dark green!), the birds legs can be tucked in to his body, tree branches can obscure my view, the bird can be moving too much or not at all. The birds aren’t dumb; they know I’m watching them and can get spooked. Or not. Depends on the bird and his mood. When they do fly away I hopefully see where they go, but I’ll hear them sing in a moment anyway. After the day in the field, I go back to the office and submit all my location data and in a week I’ll have an updated plot map. All of the points we submit get placed on the map as a symbol that represents the individual bird. In a short time we’ll have a good idea of each bird’s territory. 

Practice Netting and Banding

7FEB2012

Today was the first day in the field. My boss, Becky drove us out to our work site at Manning Mountain. Melissa, Kelsey, and I rode with Becky, Jie rode with Nathan, and Julie showed up later. Manning Mountain is about 10 miles away from the office in the Ft. Hood cantonment area. We passed bazooka ranges and Middle Eastern-themed urban assault courses. It looked like the Call of Duty video game. We drove off-road to a nice spot and spent the whole day practicing extracting and processing birds.

There were about 16 mist nets were set up in box patterns around bird feeders filled with seed. We filled the feeders, opened the nets, and retreated to the trucks for 40 minute intervals to wait while the birds fell for our trap. We caught about 30 birds that day including Chipping Sparrows, Slate-colored Dark-eyed Juncos, American Goldfinches (so tiny!). We also caught a Field Sparrow, a Brown Creeper, and a Black-crested Titmouse! I’ve seen Tufted Titmice before, but these ones were a little more funny looking with their black coloration on their head. And always with the yelling! They’re never happy to be caught or handled.

A little about the mist nets: The nets are 6 or 12m by 2m and are composed of thin thread. They each have 4 tiers, which are divided by 5 lines that run the span of the net ending in a trammel. The trammels are looped through two poles on either end which are fit into a stand on either end. There are two trammels on the bottom pole and three on the top. In the middle is a connecting piece with a length of rope attached to it which is anchored to the ground by a large rock. When the trammels are spread out, I am left with a 12 or 24 square meter area of bird trap. To close the nets, I simply group all the trammels together.

Extracting birds from the nets can be difficult. It doesn’t have to be; sometimes it’s exceedingly simple, but other times a bad tangle can leave me frustrated for the rest of the day. The procedure I have adopted is such: Free one wing, unloop the head, free the other wing, free the legs. This is just a guideline; I sometimes go in a different order depending on the type of tangle or if the bird is a biter coughcardinalscough. The wings can be tricky because I need to get them back through the square they came through and sometimes this procedure can be hampered by other parts of the net getting caught in the flight feathers or tension from another tangled part of the body like the feet. Especially the feet. The head can be tricky because it’s hard to see what loop the head went through. A general pull will usually take the head out, but sometimes the angle is messed up and you end up putting the bird’s head through another loop and have to “take his sweater off” several times before it’s completely free.  After these first two steps, the second wing and feet are usually a breeze. Feet are untangled by gently massaging the toes back and forth while simultaneously pulling the net off of them. The massaging motion uncurls the toes so you can pull the net right off. Once again, this can be made tricky by birds with strong, curved toes and claws, usually things that need good grip on trees such as woodpeckers, nuthatches, and blue jays. Once the bird is free from the net, you can deposit it in a bird bag, tie the drawstring, and clip a numbered clothespin on it to denote the net you captured the bird in. I have seen nets with as few as zero birds (several runs in a row) to seven birds, and you can catch even more. For now we are “passive netting,” meaning we leave the nets up and walk away and see what we catch. When the Golden-cheek Warblers come back from migration in Mexico we will use a technique called “target netting”. Target netting involves identifying an individual bird you wish to catch, and playing an audio recording of GCWA vocalizations to rile up the bird to fly into your net.

After taking the birds out of the net, we placed them into small cloth bags to literally hang out until we were ready to process them. We took the birds out of the bag and practiced holding them with the bander’s grip and the photographer’s grip. To use the bander’s grip we held with the bird with our index and middle finger around the birds neck so that the head is sticking through the little gap between the lower portion of the our fingers. This keeps the bird safe and steady in the hand. First thing’s first, we applied a USGS band around one of the bird’s legs. This aluminum band can be recovered by other bird researchers so the information of where the bird was caught and when can be shared with other agencies and groups. We also practiced applying color bands, but since these sparrows, titmice, and such are not our focal species, we don’t have a permit to leave them color banded, so we also got some practice taking OFF the color bands. We also practiced aging our birds. For these practice birds we utilized a book called “Guide to North American Birds” by Peter Pyle. This book is a reference to identify, age, and sex most North American passerines. We looked at the differences between the color, sheen, and wear of certain feather tracts to figure out how old they are. For reasons that take a little while to explain, we can generally only age the birds as “hatching year,” “second year,” or “after second year,” although they can be much older than two years old. Sparrows regularly live to be ten years old or more! When we finally start catching GCWAs, we will be using a much more precise guide compiled by Becky herself. The added detail will make it much easier to be accurate in aging these birds. Once we’ve gone through the procedure, the practice birds are free to go. They get to keep their USGS bling as a thank you gift for being so polite and generous. Of course, some can’t resist the free food and end up coming back sooner or later.

After a long day spent banding, gabbing, and snacking (not on the birds of course), we piled back into the trucks and headed back to the office. I feel confident that my previous work experience has prepared me well for the banding portion of this job. I am excited for the GCWAs to arrive so we may begin banding and tracking them. Once the females find a mate, they’ll begin building nests, so I’ll learn how to spot those as well.

Texas

Hello. I have been living in Texas for the past three months. Although I am employed by the University of Illinois, my work takes place on Ft. Hood Army Base. My efforts help to monitor the breeding success of the federally endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler, a small songbird that nests primarily in Juniper and Oak woodlands.

I have been rather selfish with my journal entries, which I write into my moleskine notebook, but rarely take the effort to transcribe to here. My journal is more personal than the scope of this blog should include, so I take the serious work stuff, edit it a bit, and post it here. My current hope is that my friend who works at the Naturalist Center of the California Academy of Sciences will be able to convince his bosses to pick up these entries and post them on the Academy's website. They have other blogs from their actually researchers, but since I worked there I hope they'll appreciate my stories. It's a longshot, but I figure the NC is a place for aspiring biologists of all ages, so they may welcome a first-hand view inside the nitty gritty world of field biology.

My employment here ends in June. Almost immediately afterward I will travel to Blythe, CA to start another seasonal biology position with the Southern Sierra Research Institute. The work is similar to what I am doing now, but will focus on the Yellow-billed Cuckoos. Hopefully I will be posting enough to keep you informed throughout that whole experience, rather than post everything at the end like I'm doing now. So here's what I've been doing. Sorry in advance for the copy+paste you'll run into immediately. Remember, it's what I'm putting together for another audience.

ARCHER

Okay. So the journal sucks. I even hate it. I hate writing in it every day. I do the same shit every day and it’s a chore to write down the same shit every day and then transcribe it into here (I like hard copies, what can I say). I’m also behind on my bird list, which has grown a bit! I’ll get to that later. How about I write something you guys might hate a little less than my journal. How about I actually take you through a day of banding, so you guys can get a clearer picture of what I’m doing in Indianer? Yes yes. Let’s do that.

WAKE UP! The alarm goes off anywhere between 4:20 and 5:15 every day. I jump out of bed. First thing I gotta do is open my drawer full of field clothes, put on the olive work pants I got at the army surplus store, take the belt off my shorts, put it on said work pants, and mosey to the bathroom to take a leak. After bathroom rituals, I put on the water for tea and begin preparing my lunch. The usual is a turkey sandwich decorated with spinach from Walmart, turkey from Walmart, cheddar cheese from Walmart, and wheat bread from.. IGA. I throw in two California clementines, a granola bar and set them aside. When the water is done, I put a bag of Trader Joe’s Irish breakfast tea in my thermos, fill’er up and set’er aside. Finally, I toast a bagel, put some cream cheese on it, and eat it with a glass of orange juice. I make sure to refill my waterbottle and put my gear and the bird gear in the car. If I’m driving, I’ll also bring along my iPod so I can listen to Zep, the Kinks, Muse, or Death from Above 1979 on the gooooo.

We work in pairs, sometimes assisted by our supervisor and resident biologist, James. I normally work with Catharine but I have worked with everybody by now, and all four of us have gone out together as well. There are 12 possible destinations on any particular day depending on where we are in the schedule. From our location in Bloomfield, Indiana we go to either the six stations on Navy base in Crane, or a selection of six sites in a 50 mile radius that we loosely call “Hoosier”. CRAN is quite nice. We roll up to the gate, show our base passes and ID’s, and set up shop in a nearly untouched parcel of land save a few roads. HOOS sites involve driving 30 miles up to Spencer, 50 miles down past Bedford, or two locations in between. We get paid $0.35 a mile, so driving is no biggie. It’s no coincidence that there are six stations per site and six days in our work week. We have up to four days off after that work week, but really that’s in case of a rainout during the week. If it doesn’t rain, more time off for us!

The sites are roughly 12 hectares and include the banding station and ten net lanes. The CRAN sites have already been established from previous years, and each one is set up in a very unique way. On the other hand, we created the HOOS sites from scratch and according to a set up determined by another group of researchers (wood thrush project from the Smithsonian Institute). In fact, while the CRAN sites have no pattern to them at all, the HOOS sites are rigidly defined by a 12 point grid, each point 100m apart from the next. The uniting facet of these two types of sites is that each is divided into two loops with the banding station somewhere in the middle (hopefully). When making net runs, each of us interns will follow a loop and meet back at the banding station with our quarry.

Arrive at the site before dawn. Currently, sunrise is around 6:20 AM, so we have to at the banding station about five minutes before that. We make sure to put up the thermometer and count the number of bird bags we have. Bird bags are exactly what they sound like: cloth bags that are used for carrying birds. We must be certain that we leave with as many bags as we arrived with. Missing bags can mean that somebody left a bird in a bag somewhere at the site, although more often than not a missing bag is found lying on the path sans bird after falling out of a pocket.

Once sunrise hits each intern takes a bag of five nets, which are kept in plastic grocery bags, around a loop of the site. The nets are 12m by 4m and are composed of thin thread. They each have 4 tiers, which are divided by 5 lines that run the span of the net ending in a trammel. The trammels are looped through two poles on either end, two trammels on the bottom pole and three on the top. In the middle is a connecting piece which has a length of rope tied around it in a double half hitch in order to adjust the length and therefore the resistance against the weight of the net, the other end being anchored to the ground by a piece of rebar. When the trammels are spread out, I am left with a 48 square meter area of bird trap. To close the nets, I simply group all the trammels together, collect the net from one end to the other, and deposit it in a plastic bag with the trammels looped through the handles.

Once all the nets are up, there’s usually enough time to look at my watch and realize that it’s time to go on a net run. Net runs occur every 40 minutes and take one intern over the course of one loop of the site (five nets) and end back at the banding station. In order to follow the loop, I have to keep my eye out for pieces of flagging tied around trees every 10m or so. It can get a little difficult to follow at times, but I know the courses by now, so I don’t go more than 20ft off the track, and even then I just back up to the last bit of flagging and look harder. If all goes according to plan, nets open at 6:20 AM and net runs continue from 7:00 AM, 7:40 AM… until 12:20 PM, six hours after sunup, and the nets are closed on this last run. If there aren’t any arthropod surveys or habitat structure assessments, then I can concentrate on birding by ear and extracting birds from nets.

Extracting birds from the nets can be the most difficult part of the job. It doesn’t have to be; sometimes it’s exceedingly simple, but other times a bad tangle can leave me frustrated for the rest of the day. The procedure I have adopted is such: Free one wing, unloop the head, free the other wing, free the legs. This is just a guideline; I sometimes go in a different order depending on the type of tangle or if the bird is a real biter coughcardinalscough. The wings can be tricky because I need to get them back through the square they came through and sometimes this procedure can be hampered by other parts of the net getting caught in the flight feathers or tension from another tangled part of the body like the feet. Especially the feet. The head can be tricky because it’s hard to see what loop the head went through. A general pull will usually take the head out, but sometimes the angle is messed up and you end up putting the bird’s head through another loop and have to “take his sweater off” several times before it’s completely free. Wood Thrushes have big heads too, so that can make things difficult. After these first two steps, the second wing and feet are usually a breeze. Feet are untangled by gently massaging the toes back and forth while simultaneously pulling the net off of them. The massaging motion uncurls the toes so you can pull the net right off. Once again, this can be made tricky by birds with strong, very curved toes and claws, usually things that need good grip on trees such as woodpeckers, nuthatches, and blue jays. Once the bird is free from the net, you can deposit it in a bird bag, tie the drawstring, and clip a numbered clothespin on it to denote the net you captured the bird in. I have seen nets with as few as zero birds (several runs in a row) to seven birds, and you can catch even more. When I’ve extracted all the birds from a net I’ll continue to the next nets and then back to the banding station.

The banding station is where the data entry occurs. To begin, we pull a band off of a thin wire with a special pair of banding pliers. The pliers have two prongs on the top lateral side that when the pliers are opened so is the band. We take a lot of standard bird measurements, like wing chord and mass, and some other fun ones. The cloacal protrusion, how much the cloaca swells up, can tell us the sex of the bird and if they are breeding. Another breeding characteristic is the brood patch which is generally a female trait, but there are exceptions. We skull the bird, meaning we push it’s head feathers away at look at the pneumatization of the skull. Most adult passerines have two layers of skull. One that is present when hatched, and another that develops after the hatch year. The defining mark are the little columns of bone that are visible under the skin. An adult bird will usually have a complete secondary skull. Anything less is a younger bird. Finally we check the fat and molt. These stats lead us into aging the bird which can be very difficult. At the beginning of the season we were mostly getting second years and after second years, but now we’re getting some hatch year birds. We enlist the help of Peter Pyle’s Identification Guide to North American Birds, which is this huge black book that looks kinda like a bible. It gives detailed information about the specific molting, plumage, sexing, and breeding characteristics of birds. We mostly use it to determine how old a bird is. The usual giveaway is the difference between the primary coverts and the secondary coverts. This is an entry all to itself so I’m just going to leave that there. At the end we yank two retrices (butt feathers) out of their ass and send them on their way. We have additional stuff to do with Wood Thrushes, since the Wood Thrush researchers are why we have funding, including color banding.

At the end of the day, we close the nets and process the rest of our birds. When all that’s done we pack up, make sure we have all the nets and bird bags (once again, failure to do so can result in bird death, so this is a critical double check), and get the hell out of there before the mosquitoes eat us to death. I hope you enjoyed this non-journal-entry and that you come away from it with a detailed knowledge of what I’m doing in Indiana. I haven’t told too many people the details because, frankly, it takes too long. Especially in passing or light conversation. This is what I do. I don’t know if I’ll do it forever, but I think I’ll probably keep it up for a bit. I’m looking at more banding jobs and am aiming for ones that will take me overseas. There are a lot of opportunities like that, but I need more (unpaid) experience so that they’ll actually want to spend money on me. If I get bored I’ll probably try to switch organisms or hell, go to grad school. Ugh. Don’t want to think about that. Keep your eyes and ears open for ze birds!