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.