• While not nearly as diverse as the first half of the month, the final total for this week was 25 more birds than either of the first two weeks of the month.  This was despite our having lost two days of banding (and at least a couple hundred net hours of effort) this week due to rain and high winds on August 19th and 21st. Our total of 53 Ruby-throated Hummingbirds pushed that species into the top spot this week, and, with 44 flycatchers of six species banded, there is no doubt that the momentum of fall migration has picked up at Powdermill.  Large flocks of Cedar Waxwings also helped boost our totals this week, albeit largely birds from the local breeding population.

• As always, the success of a banding program as large scale as that at Powdermill is only possible with the help of dedicated volunteers and interns.  We thank Mike Comley, Randi Gerrish, Dan Hinnebusch, Annie Lindsay, Cokie Lindsay, Trish Miller, Felicity Newell, and also visiting banders, Jim Ingold from Louisiana, and Sandy and Gary Lockerman from Harrisburg, for their help this month with banding.

• With so many Ruby-throated Hummingbirds we had no excuse, except for the fact that 83% were hatching year birds, for us not to finally get a good shot of an adult male, with just the right light angle to illuminate its jewel-like gorget.

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• Our highlight from August 17th, the first banding day of the week, is this hatching year Northern Cardinal that was in a particularly precocious plumage for this time of year.  The black feathers around the bill are usually not grown in on juveniles until mid to late fall, and this is one of the very first times we have ever seen this extent of color develop on such a young bird  The bird was still mostly in juvenal plumage, had a fleshy gape and very dusky bill, which turns orange as the bird ages.  He certainly made up for his recent sloppy meal of red berries (still stuck to his bill) with his otherwise good looks.

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• On August 18th, we banded a hatching year female Common Yellowthroat with a particularly pronounced line of fault bars.  Fault bars, feather growth bars exaggerated due to nutritional stress, appear like structural breaks in the feathers.  Both adults and juveniles have feather growth bars, but they often are more obvious in young birds because of dietary stresses during the nestling and post-fledging periods when the juvenal feathers are still growing in.  In this instance, since the fault bars occur near the tips of the feathers, this bird had dietary deficiencies just prior to or just after fledging, when those feathers were just breaking sheath and beginning to grow (photo below).  When they occur in adults, the bars are not aligned and not equidistant from the tips of the feathers, as in the case below, because adults molt their feathers sequentially and not concurrently.

• It's no surprise the rest of our highlights are from August 22nd, our top day with 103 birds banded.  We caught our first hatching year American Goldfinch for the season, this male pictured below.  Goldfinches are a late-nesting species, often timing their nesting to be feeding their young at the height of the flowering and seeding season for thistle and other composite flowers, by which time many species already have begun their southward migration!  Note the broad buffy wing bars, a juvenal characteristc, and the black wings which make it a male.

• While the color in the photo is faint, we still found it interesting to show this hatching year Veery banded on Sunday whose belly feathers had a very light wash of pink (instead of the normal white/buff color).  It, no doubt, is a dietary response, but we can only speculate that it is from the Tartarian Honeysuckle which we know Veery's feed heavily upon while still molting at Powdermill (the same berries that result in the orange tail band color in Cedar Waxwings) .

• Of course, amongst the 103 birds banded Sunday, we managed to net a few nice wood warblers.  This beautiful hatching year male Northern Parula....

• and to add to the hatching year female Mourning Warbler (the first of the four "confusing fall wablers" posted last week), an adult female (top) and male (bottom) Mourning Warbler.

• Last week's four confusing fall warblers were (from top to bottom):

• Finally, we've added a picture of a bird banded last week which we forgot to include in the update.  This hatching year female Brown-headed Cowbird, sex determined by wing length based on an analyzed sample of over 2300 birds from EBBA Monograph 1, Relationships Among Body Mass, Fat, Wing Length, Age, and Sex for 170 species of Birds Banded at Powdermill Nature Reserve where females are < 101.5 and males are > 103.0, was caught on August 14th.  We felt it a highlight worth adding this week because we very rarely catch cowbirds after spring.  We have only ever banded 42 over all fall seasons from the past 43 years and, in fact, this is the first fall cowbird in 14 years.

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Last Updated on 08/26/04
By Adrienne J. Leppold