the early bird...

catches something, but it was far too wet for worms. just before i headed off to bed thursday night, i called lenny to tell him the latest on running school field trips out to the bear pond natural area. i thought it might be possible to get together with him on friday. he suggested i meet him and christian and do a bit of bird banding. "meet us at the pull off at 5:30!"

the decoy...

like i have said before, i get up early, so i agreed right off. when i pulled over, with my bike lights strobing, he and his grad student, christian, were a bit surprised. i changed into boots and followed them into the foggy, dim woods. we put up our first set, a few hundred yards along the path. almost as soon as lenny walked away from turning on his i pod to play the canada warbler call beneath a decoy warbler he had fastened onto a bush, an unbanded male flew into the mist net. (pam says, "that's so sneaky!") before we were even done banding the first male and taking down the biometrics, we had a female in the net. things went fairly smoothly and quickly given we had three pairs of hands to operate with.

lenny, male canada warbler, and me

canada warbler and christian

we set the net up about four more times with equally pleasing results, capturing four more unbanded CAWA--ornithologist code for canada warblers--and two special prizes, warblers with geolocator devices (this site shows an example of those devices) on their backs! the trick with these miniature electronic trackers is the birds they ride on have to be recaptured to retrieve the tracker and read the data. attached to the bird one year, when caught again the a year later, the migratory history of that bird is captured. the canada warbler is a long distance migrator, wintering in the southern most regions of central america and the northern most parts of south america.






chasing the last 'geo' bird, we splashed across the beaver dam and through the drainage area several more times. we ended up netting one more unbanded male CAWA, but not red over yellow. it was getting sunny out and on toward 9:00 so we pulled in a last set without getting a bird and headed out toward rt 4. at one point we passed a really cool burl that had started to be hollowed out by something. christian snapped this picture for me a few days later. turns out he and lenny tried fairly hard to get the male with the locator they had spotted earlier, but ended up only capturing several more unbanded males.

i like to think that somewhere out there, a male CAWA with a geolocator is laughing at us! "ha ha ha"