Healed

Mornings like this are always encouraging when it comes to the subject of bird injuries. Occasionally birds can get injured during the banding process, sometimes resulting in something like a broken leg. While this is very rare, it is something we think about a lot, doing everything we can to prevent. In the case of a broken leg we treat the injury to the best of our abilities and release the bird back into the wild. It may seem far fetched to assume a one legged bird can survive in the wild, but it does happen and we have recaptured birds with fully healed legs that had once been broken while banding or in the wild.

Today, our first bird was a hermit thrush (second of the summer!). Though it had never been banded before, you can tell in the picture below that this bird's right leg had once been broken, but was is now completely healed, and strong as ever (well, almost). I did however band it on it's left leg, as the crook in it's right may have caused some complications with the band moving freely.


Just now we caught his purple finch! This is a fully healed injury where the bird is missing all of it's leg below it's tarsal joint (essentially below the knee). Not only was this bird doing fine, but it had a brood patch, indicating that it was a breeding female.

HETH v SWTH

We just caught our first hermit thrush of the season! While they are quite common during the winter, they don't breed here at palo. We do hear them over the hill occasionally, but never catch adults until the breeding season is over. This juvenile was a surprise at the net, as it was noticeably smaller than our usual thrush and after taking a look at the wing, we realized why. Compared to the swainson's thrush, which weighed ~29 grams, this guy was ~20 grams.

On the bird on the left, the fourth flight feather from the end of the wing is longer than the outer most feather, as well as emarginated, making it a hermit thrush. On the bird on the right, the fourth feather from the end of the wing is shorter than the outer most feather, and is not emarginated, making it a swainson's thrush.

Fog at the gulch today

Banded at Pine Gulch today with Lisa. Alright day, but felt kind of rusty having not banded since sunday. We got 17 birds, 8 species.

This lil guy was very tangled in the net, so I had to cut him out eventually. He eventually flew off, but kind of pitifully. Sorry lil guy.


That is a tick. I tried removing it, but couldn't I sliced it, so that it would at least not impede vision as much.


Here's a golden crowned sparrow. Their crown patterns can vary quite a bit, and can only be used for ageing if they are at the more extreme ends of having very little brown striping, or a lot of black. This one was in between, but had about three black feathers on its head, which make you wonder.

NYE2K!)

Went to Muddy Hollow with Lisa today for banding. We had a big day, with 37 total birds, 8 species. One of the net runs left us with 17 birds in one net, 16 of which were Myrtle's yellow-rumped warblers. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but they are big, hearty warblers, so none of them got stressed. The unfortunately thing was that my supervisor was not there. While I feel like I now have a better idea of the differences I can see between 16 MYWA's, I am still unsure of what specific features help me distinguish a hatch year male from an after half year female. I did see two birds that seemed to clearly be after hatch year males, but the rest were recorded as unknown unknown... There are so many details for each species and until you are taught what's actually important, as opposed to what the guide tells us, it is hard to feel confident about many grey areas of ageing and sexing.

Here are the bags with birds in them, waiting to be banded after our flock of warblers hit.


The backside of what looked to certainly be an AHY male (looking at the size of the black centers of the feathers between the yellow rump and tail..


AMRO


Hermit thrush with some weird growth defect.

Long day

Yesterday Joe, Diana and I went to Pine Gulch, the offsite by the lagoon, and had a successful day of banding. We got 21 birds and 11 species, one of which was a swamp sparrow, something that's only caught around here about once a year. This was the last of the banding until Sunday, but luckily I'm here, so it can happen! Kidding, I'd rather be home.

Wrentit




A hermit thrush in the net before extraction.


Bewick's wren.

Muddy Hollow

I went to another offsite today with Michael. It was probably the most beautiful day I've had here so far. Nothing too special on the bird front, but we brought in about 15 and I got to see a lot of hermit thrush. Tomorrow I get to check out or third offsite and will then be expecting about a week of rain.



Banana slugz


Ruby crowned kinglet


Hermit thrush