PICTORIAL HIGHLIGHTS, WEEK
OF 11/13/01-11/18/01
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Saturday & Sunday, November
17-18, 2001: Calm, mild, and
very foggy on Saturday morning, becoming sunny by afternoon. Clear
and cold overnight, with frost and very heavy, make
that meteoric, showers in the early AM.
Truly, the Leonid meteor shower, at its peak from about 5:00-6:00am, was
all it was advertised to be! We hope that many of you also had the
chance to enjoy what was a bona fide spectacle! The remainder
of Sunday was sunny and unseasonably, but pleasantly, very mild.
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Banding on Saturday continued to be, as it has
been all week, on the slow side, but by running almost all of our nets
for all of the daylight hours, we managed a respectable banding total of
59 birds, including (finally!) a new species for the fall--an immature
male House Sparrow.
HOSPs
aren't very glamorous (and maybe not even particularly well-liked by some!),
but they're kind of rare at Powdermill, so, believe it or not, we actually
consider the banding of one here to be a "highlight," especially when it's
the very first one for the season. You may remember, we made a bit
of a fuss about our first European Starling
a few weeks ago, too!
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Our hope by running nets all day Saturday (i.e.,
until after nightfall) was that we might catch an owl
or a crepuscular (i.e., dawn and dusk active) bird, such as American
Woodcock. One unexpected benefit of
operating into the evening hours was that we banded two Fox
Sparrows on their way to roost in an alder
thicket. This gave us a total of four FOSPs
for the day, our highest daily total for this species all season.
Our good luck continued when the first check of
our nets after the day active birds had settled in for the night produced
our first of two Northern Saw-whet Owls!
The first bird, a hatching year (HY) female, was caught passively (i.e.,
without an audio lure) in a mist net set at the edge of a swampy thicket
and dry old field, no doubt shortly after it had left its daytime roost
to begin looking for prey at last light.
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A second NSWO,
also an HY-F, was caught several hours later in response to tape playback
of NSWO calls.
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Because heavy white frost that had settled onto
all of our open nets overnight (making them both highly visible and very
stiff and heavy), we caught very few birds on Sunday, and none until more
than three hours after sunrise--it took that much time before the frost
had finally melted off our nets and the water produced by this melting
had dried away.
While the nets were thawing enough to catch birds,
we took the opportunity to continue our quest for night birds. To
do this we erected a ladder up to at several large nest boxes that we have
put up for use by roosting
Eastern Screech
Owls. First, we checked a box where
a gray phase EASO
had been seen by our resident mammalogists (Dr.
Joseph Merritt and his Research Assistant,
Jamie
Fischer) while they were searching for flying
squirrel roosts a couple of days ago. Sure enough, there was an owl
at home when banding intern, Brian Jones,
reached into the box. It turned out to be a very fat (nearly a "3"
on our scale of 0-3, and weighing 194.7 grams) and very sleepy owl that
had been banded previously. As it turns out, #745-11130 had been
caught and originally banded from the exact same box almost seven years
ago, on New Year's Day in 1995! At banding she was determined to
be a second-year (SY) bird, which means she hatched in the spring of 1994.
She had been recaptured in the same box another time, on 2/25/96, or about
a year after she was banded.
An old hand at being handled, #745-11130
barely opened her eyes from the time she was removed, through the entire
time that she was being processed in our banding lab (about a quarter mile
away from the box where she was recaptured), to when she was returned to
the box about a half hour later. She never made any attempt to grab
with her talons or to bite (Powdermill bander Bob
Mulvihill even trusted the seven and a half
year old owl to be held for a picture by his nine year old son Robert).
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A check of another roost box turned up another
banded gray phase EASO,
but this one was wide awake and "lean and mean" (no fat and weighing just
177.8g)! #745-11141 and her three downy young were originally banded
out of a box within 200 yards of the banding lab on 5/25/98 (when she was
determined to be an SY bird). She was recaptured today in a box <150
yards from the lab and within 300 yds. of the box where she was found nesting
three and a half years ago. Unlike the docile #745-11130, #745-11141
kept everyone on their toes
watching out for her toes,
and her beak, too!
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Click here to see
a G-Owl-lery of more photos.
Thursday, November 15, 2001:
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Among the few birds banded today was our first
Yellow-rumped
Warbler in ten days and our sixth Belted
Kingfisher of the season, a hatching year
(HY) male (photo).
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Wednesday, November 14, 2001:
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The Dark-eyed Junco
(Junco hyemalis)
migrations at Powdermill are comprised of up to four recognizable subspecies.
The dominate form here is the migratory nominate race, J.
h. hyemalis, the familiar northern Slate-colored
Junco which nests from the north slope of
Alaska across Canada to New England. Rarest here are true "Oregon"
Dark-eyed Juncos (J.
h. oreganus) of the Pacific Northwest.
Only a handful (<15) out of some 35,000 juncos banded at Powdermill
in the last 40 years have possibly represented individuals of this race.
Regularly included in our fall banding totals
(but totalling <5% of our catch), however, are juncos of the distinctive
(larger, paler gray, and with a bluish, rather than pinkish bill color,
compared to J. h. hyemalis)
local breeding race here in the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania:
J.
h. carolinensis, also known as the Carolina
Junco. This subspecies is called a latitudinal
migrant, because, rather than moving south for the winter, most individuals
simply move short distances from their higher elevation breeding grounds
in the mountains (these juncos nest at higher elevations at Powdermill)
to lower levels for the winter.
Next to nominate hyemalis,
the commonest form of junco, making up as much as 10-15% of our migrant
sample, is a little known and variable race, J.
h. cismontanus, which is believed to have
originated through the intergradation of Slate-colored
and Oregon-type
juncos in the eastern Rocky Mountain region of northern Alberta and British
Columbia. Because extreme individuals of cismontanus
approach
them in coloration, and many bird watchers in the East are unaware of the
existence of this intergrade race, it is likely that cismontanus
frequently are mistaken for Oregon Juncos.
This is particularly true for female cismontanus,
which, like Oregon Juncos,
usually have reddish brown side coloration that contrasts markedly with
the lower edge of their gray hood (unlike Oregon
Juncos, however, there usually is little or
no contrast in the coloration of the upper edge of their hood and back).
Importantly, not all juncos showing browinsh side coloration are cismontanus
(females
of nominate hyemalis
often have their plumage, including their sides, heavily suffused with
brown)--the key feature distinguishing cismontanus
females is a fairly sharp demarcation between browish sides and a gray
hood. In male cismontanus,
the sides are a lighter shade of gray, like a typical Slate-colored
Junco, while the hood is nearly black, like
an Oregon.
Below are photos of a fairly typical immature
female cismontanus
that we banded today.
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