Banding highlights today included two more Marsh
Wrens (bringing our fall total to 5) and our
100th species for the fall, a Brown Creeper.
Unfortunately, our digital camera has broken down, and there will be no
original photo highlights until it has been repaired or replaced (within
a few days, we hope). The photos below were taken of a BRCR
last fall.
Saturday, September 29, 2001:
Three Yellow-bellied
Sapsuckers were our first to band for the
season. All were hatching year (HY) birds with much retained brownish
juvenal body plumage, two being males with their red throat patches molting
in (photo below left) and one being a female with white throat feathers
molting in (photo below right).
Friday, September 28, 2001:
An adult male Prairie
Warbler banded at Powdermill 9/28/01
Our first White-crowned
Sparrow (an immature bird) of the season
Thursday, September 27, 2001:
No new species were banded today; our banding
highlight came at the end of the day with the capture of our second Green
Heron of the season.
Wednesday, September 26, 2001:
We banded one new species for the fall: Red-breasted
Nuthatch. A very colorful adult male,
the RBNU had
large fat deposits and weighed 12.3g. He is the third heaviest out
of some 50 RBNUs
in our banding files (we think he even looks pretty hefty in the photo!)
Among the three Black-throated Blue Warblers banded
today was an immature (HY) male. Although HY male BTBWs have the
same overall color pattern as adult males, they almost invariably have
at least a few white or partially white feathers scattered among the black
feathers of their chin and throat. Today's HY male, pictured below
(left), had more than the usual amount of white and provides a particularly
strong contrast with the adult male (right) whose photo first appeared
here last week.
