Orange-crowned and Bushtit

Though these two species frequent similar habitat, I was fairly weirded out to see them sitting so close together for some reason.

Bushtits

Male on the left (dark eye), nugget (no tail feathers) female on the right (light eye)

SW fest

Bushtit


Black Phoebe with a dragonfly in mouth


Female western bluebird with huge cricket of some sort

Tiny birds

Hummingbird and band


Bushtit

ssolata

We also caught a Mourning Dove today

Good day at Pine Gulch. Only about 12 birds, but that's a lot for now, and we got a good variety again. Also, it's our second beautiful day in a row after weeks of rain, which is always uplifting.

Female AMRO


Male BUSH

Bigish day

Crazy day at Pine Gulch for us. After a fairly unsuccessful day yesterday we re-setup today, expecting worse weather than yesterday. It was looking that way, but after opening and closing the nets a couple of times, we were able to keep them running for close to enough hours. However, the wind picked up, and despite the clear sky we had to shut down early. That, however, does not mean that we didn't get any birds. On one net run we had 17 birds, which made things hectic as it started to rain, bird bags were low, and new interns are still working on skills like extraction (let alone doing it under semi-pressure). It all went well though, and ended up having a nice flow of birds for the next couple of hours, leaving us with a final of 25 birds and 7 species, which included: swamp sparrow, both subspecies of yellow rumped warblers, pine siskin, Anna's hummingbird, bushtit, common yellowthroat, and lincoln's sparrow.

Here is the swamp sparrow, a species we only catch a few times a year:


Female common yellowthroat


Male common yellowthroat


Cara and Renee processing the hummingbird




Female bushtit


Faded wingtips

Anna's Hummingbirds

We got a good day of banding in at Pine Gulch today, catching 18 birds, 9 new, 9 recaptures.

Six of the birds we caught were Anna's hummingbirds. The first three we caught were within 3 inches of each other in a net, two males and a female, which had clearly been chasing each other.

Here is an after second year male, with a full crown and gorget:




The ASY male being weighed


Here is what I think we decided was an unknown aged female, with some feathers in it's gorget and two pink crown feathers:


Here is an after hatch year female, which had a limited number of pink gorget feathers, and no pink in it's crown:


When processing birds we do a lot of blowing of air on their bodies and through their feathers to take a look at molt, brood patches, cloacal protuberances, fat, etc. Some birds have feathers everywhere, but interestingly hummingbirds do not (this is not a brood patch):


Wrentit being weighed:


Wrentit:


A bushtit with lots of pollen around it's bill. The light iris color means it's a female:


Michael caught in an awkward moment:


The view from the banding spot at Pine Gulch, apparently it snowed at the top yesterday...

BT

Bushtit




Here is a good example of a molt limit in a bewick's wren wing. You can see a slight color difference between the shafts of the outer three large feathers (the primaries) and the inner ones. The outer feathers have a dark brown color to them, whereas the inner ones have a light brown color. The darker brown indicates newer feathers. When you can see two generations of feathers in a wing at this time of year, it generally means that this is a first year bird because as an adult it would have undergone a complete molt, and would not show any remaining older feathers.