POWDERMILL NATURE RESERVE PICTORIAL BANDING HIGHLIGHTS September 3-14, 2003
September 14, 2003:
Cool and foggy in the early am, becoming suny and mild by late am.
Fairly light flight calling by noctural migrants during net opening
just before dawn.
.
Sunday ended the first of our Bander
Development Workshops at Powdermill. Attending the workshop were
Guy Ubaghs and Rosemary Spreha (for part of the week). The week netted
us 644 new birds of 59 species to band, examine, and discuss, with an additional
122 recaptures of previously banded birds. We greatly appreciated
the help we received during the week from Guy and Rosemary--although primarily
owl banders, their interest and enthusiam for learning more about the banding
techniques associated with songbird banding was very much to their (and
to the Master permit holder for whom they both work, Scott Weidensaul's)
credit.
.
Below is a picture of Guy Ubaghs
showing Powdermill bander Mike Lanzone's children, Jeffrey and Ashley,
the very last bird processed during the first workshop week, a Ruby-throated
Hummingbird. Four RTHUs
were banded on Sunday, 58 during the week, and 248 so far this fall.
A Green
Heron banded on Sunday (photo below), a hatching
year female (age determined, among other things, by the comparatively dull
crown and back color, chestut-edged lesser coverts, and rounded, buff-edged
median and greater coverts; sex based on its very small size--unflattened
wing, 172.0mm; exposed culmen 56.0m), was new for our Fall 2003 banding
list. For banders who may not be familar with this resource, excellent
descriptions for the plumages of wading birds, like the GRHE
can be found in Ralph Palmer's Handbook of
North American Birds, Vol. 1 (Loons through
Flamingos), published by Yale University Press in 1962. In addition,
Vols. 2 & 3 of this series treat waterfowl, and Vols. 4 & 5 are
devoted to diurnal raptors.
. Although a comparatively small
bird by its linear measurements, it had been feeding well along the edges
of Powdermill's small marshy ponds, accumulating a near maximum fat deposit
and weighing a hefty 222.5 grams.
Although not new for the season,
we banded our second Cape May Warbler
of the fall on Sunday, a hatching year (HY) female (top bird in photo below)
to compare with an HY male (bottom bird in photo below) caught yesterday.
The HY female differs in having two thin grayish-white wingbars and little
or no yellow in the face and breast, while the HY male has a very broad
white upper wing bar and frequently is quite yellow in these regions, although
never as brightly colored as an adult (AHY) male (the individual
pictured below from yesterday actually was rather dull, even for an HY
male).
.
This is a species that moves along
the higher ridgetops in migration moreso than across valleys like the one
in which Powdermil is situated. Even when they are in the banding
area, they often are feeding higher in the trees or at the forest edge,
where they can't be caught in our low nets. It probably takes the
very uncommon combination of unusally high numbers of birds and particular
local weather conditions (e.g., rain or fog at heigher elevations) that
force them both to lower elevations and lower heights in the vegetation,
in order for us to obtain a big fall banding total (ca. 200 or more) for
CMWAs.
This hasn't happened since 1990, and only five times prior to that, going
back to the start of the Powdermill banding program in 1961 (Click
here for chart of fall totals; use back button on your browser to return
to this page).
September 12-13, 2003:
Weather continued very good for banding over the last two days, despite
the fact that light winds were not out of a northerly direction (instead
east or southeast). Very heavy flight calling of nocturnal migrants
(especially thrushes) was heard during pre-dawn net opening on 9/12, but
much less calling was evident on the morning of 9/13. Interestingly,
while overall banding totals and capture rates were similar on the two
days (see table above), the thrush captures were very different--28 thrushes
of three species were banded on 9/12, but just four thrushes of three species
were banded today. Bander workshop attendees, Rosemary Spreha and
Guy Ubaghs, helped with the banding, as did Carroll Labarthe, David Liebmann,
Trish Miller and Jeffrey and Ashley Lanzone.
.
The first note for this installment
has nothing to do with banding or birds, except that a Ligonier neighbor,
Fred Tomlinson, found a creature he had never seen underneath his bird
feeder, and he wanted to know if we could tell him what it was. He
described it over the phone as being six inches long, greenish blue with
hard red horns on its head. Fred and his wife Doris brought the mystery
creature to our office at the end of the banding day, and it truly was
one of the most impressive Hickory Horned
Devil caterpillars any of us had ever seen!
All we could think was it would take some kind of bird to try and make
a meal out of it! It measured five and a half inches long and weighed
29.5 grams! Fred and Doris took the amazing caterpillar back home
with them in a jar full of black walnut leaves (one of the species larval
food plants), so they could show it to their grandchildren who were coming
for a visit later this weekend.
Hickory Horned Devil
(caterpillar of the Royal Walnut Moth)
Doris and Fred Tomlinson and
their prize caterpillar!
Over the last two days, we've banded
117 wood warblers of 19 species, led by Magnolia
(41 banded), Black-throated Green
(11), American Redstart
(11), Common Yellowthroat
(10), and Hooded Warbler
(9).
.
Friday was our best banding day
of the season so far, with 141 birds of 35 species. Two species,
Nashville
Warbler and Olive-sided
Flycatcher, were new for the season, but the
best (i.e., most interesting) bird was our second Yellow-breasted
Chat of the fall, but our first orange-breasted
YBCH
of the season. In fact, this hatching year YBCH
was among the deepest and most uniformly colored orange variant we have
ever seen. Like, Cedar Waxwings
with the orange tail band variation, YBCH
that eat quantities of Tartarian or Morrow's honeysuckle berries while
they're molting incorporate the red plant pigment rhodoxanthin into parts
of their plumage that normally are yellow.
The parade of misshapen birds
at Powdermill continues--another Hooded Warbler
was caught on Friday with a very distorted and crossed bill.
With all of the migrants moving
through in the past few days, it was with a certain amount of surprise
that we netted this very recently fledged
Northern Cardinal.
September 9-11, 2003:
Perfect banding weather and the extra help to take advantage of it always
is a welcome combination. Our usual volunteers, Hope Carpenter and
Randi Gerrish, helped with the banding over the last few days, as did a
terrific new addition to the Powdermill staff, Mike Lanzone. In addition
to joining the Powdermill banding program, Mike, who trained under Betsy
Brooks at Braddock Bay Bird Observatory, will be assisting Powdermill bander
Bob Mulvihill with coordinating the second Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas,
scheduled to begin in 2004. The two also are working on a Photographic
Guide to Ageing and Sexing of North American Birds,
to be published by Princeton University Press--the first volume will cover
the wood warblers.
. In addition to Powdermill's
staff and volunteers, help with the banding over the last three days has
come from Guy Ubaghs and Rosemary Spreha, who are attending the first of
Powdermill's Bander Development workshops. Both Guy and Rosemary
are subpermitees of Scott Weidensaul, working on Scott's ground-breaking
banding studies of Northern Saw-whet Owl
migration in Pennsylvania. It has been a real pleasure (and great
fun, too!) to have them both working alongside us here at Powdermill, comparing
techniques, sharing knowledge, and enjoying the birds, which, as you all
will see, have put on a pretty good show! . In the photos below (both by
Mike Lanzone) Bob Mulvihill shows Guy Ubaghs the molt pattern of an ASY
male Purple Finch;
Bob Leberman and Rosemary Spreha examine a Yellow-bellied
Flycatcher.
Among the 337 birds of 46 species
banded thus far in the current week (including 64 Magnolia
Warblers) were three new species for the fall
season. This beautiful adult female Golden-winged
Warbler graced our nets on Thursday morning
(and graces our
home page now, too; that photo
by Mike Lanzone).
Believe it or not, that was not
our best bird of the last three days. On Wednesday, we banded a bird
that we have banded only three others of here at Powdermill, and none in
the last 30 years! In fact, the hatching year female Summer
Tanager pictured below was the first fall
SUTA
(and the first female) we have ever banded. Interestingly, considering
our recent discussions of bill deformities, this bird had a slightly crossed
bill (second photo below).
Another bill deformity this week
was this Hooded Warbler with
a shriveled upper mandible (see below for a picture of a HOWA
with a crossed bill last week).
This adult male Canada
Warbler, however, was flawless!
September 3-7, 2003:
The first cooler, autumn-like weather of the season, along with generally
drier days, allowed for a greater banding effort, which resulted in our
highest weekly banding total of the season, and our second busiest banding
day so far this fall--104 birds on 9/05. Hope Carpenter, Randi Gerrish,
Mike Lanzone, Trish Miller, and Brian Jones helped with the banding this
week.
.
Eight new species were added to
the fall 2003 banding list this week, half of these were local residents,
including this late-hatched Blue Jay
still mostly in grayish juvenal plumage (top photo below);
A heavily molting Hermit
Thrush with a bright and swollen gape (first
photo below) that made it look very immature even though its heavy wing
and tail molt proved it was an adult--in fact, the shape and minimal wear
of its unmolted tail feathers (second photo below) and the non-juvenal
appearance of its unmolted primary coverts and alula (third photo below)
showed it to be an older, after second year (ASY) bird;
An immature male Purple
Finch still in heavy first prebasic molt (immature
male PUFIs cannot
be sexed with certainty unless the incoming first basic wing and body feathers
are strongly tinged with red, as in this bird);
Lastly, a second year (SY) Downy
Woodpecker in the late stages of its second
prebasic molt, having already replaced all but the outer few of its first
basic primaries, all of its juvenal secondaries, and the outer few juvenal
primary coverts (the retained, very worn and brown, inner primary coverts
now being well over a year old).
The other four new species banded
for this fall, however, were true passage migrants, including our first
Blackpoll
Warbler (first photo below, a hatching year
bird of unknown sex) and Wilson's Warbler
(second photo below, an HY male). The other two, not pictured here,
were Connecticut Warbler and
Bay-breasted
Warbler.
We have
mentioned a couple of times earlier this fall about the prevalence of bill
and leg deformities this season, which we think may be a result of the
very wet summer weather, which may have promoted the transmission of viral
and fungal diseases, like foot pox. Among the affected birds this
week was a cross-billed
Gray Catbird,
that happened to be heavily molting when we banded it--there was unusually
heavy sheathing on its molting feathers, which we thought might have been
the result of an inability of the bird to preen itself effectively.
The other cross-billed bird was
an immature male Hooded Warbler.
An immature Kentucky
Warbler showed several leg and foot lesions,
either foot pox, scars from blowfly larvae, or both. Many more than
the usual number and kinds of birds at Powdermill have exhibited foot and
leg scarring like this KEWA.
Are any other banders seeing increased incidence of such bill, leg, and
foot abnormailities this season?
