Special thanks also are due Glenn Stauffer, a graduate of Millersville State University,  who spent the summer here at Powdermill working on various projects as our Rea Intern in Applied Ecology.  One of those projects involved collecting lots of GPS field data and producing (using GIS software) the very nice final maps of our banding area and mist net locations that form the fronticepiece of our new "virtual" net lane tour.

Oh yeah, and he helped with the banding from time to time, too!

Thanks again, Glenn, for all your hard work, and best of luck!

With much of their fall migration yet to come, our fall 2002 total for RTHU (217) already is the second highest in the history of the Powdermill banding program.  The record (309) was set in the fall of 1962, and there has been no real challenge to that record in the last 40 years (see chart below)--that is, until now!

Hint:  secondaries 4-6 on the bird in question were not in sheath, but secondaries 7 & 9 (i.e., the inner and outer terials) were.

Answer:  When it's a very precocious HY male COYE in the last stages of an unusually extensive first prebasic molt!   Seeing the unexpected (for an adult) combination of outer primaries and tertials molting concurrently forced us to look a little closer at a COYE banded this week that looked, at least superficially, like a good fit for AHY male.

In adult passerines, the tertials begin molting shortly after the inner primaries and are completely grown by the time the outer primaries have begun to molt.  Appropriately enough, the bird in question proved to have an incompletely pneumatized skull and, upon closer examination, a molt limit could be seen between its retained juvenal primaries 1-6 and the molting primaries 7-9.  In the photo below, this HY male is the top bird, and below it is a superficially very similar (somewhat duller than usual) AHY male banded the next day.

Moral of the story for banders:  its always a good idea to double-check those skulls in the fall!