A person with a banding sub-permit can band on their own. Nancy Furber just got hers AND (fortuitously) she has been able to attract a flock of Snow Buntings (henceforth referred to by their AOU alpha code: SNBU) to the field right next door. How convenient is that!?
So…..she’s out banding (on January 12th) and lo and behold she extracts from the trap an already banded SNBU. It was an ASY-M (i.e., an After Second Year – Male: thus, at least 2 years or more old). This bird had been banded just 5 days before by David Lamble north of Fergus. It weighed 39.5 g when it was first banded and 39.6 when Nancy got it – so it hadn’t lost any weight in its journey. We know VERY little about SNBU’s in the Winter – how they move around, survive, etc. But recoveries like this will help clear things up.
By the way, David Lamble is a Banding Machine – in the past 3 years he has banded over 10,000 SNBU’s (and a pile of other species). I learned a ton by going up to Fergus and spending a morning with him. I’m not sure, but I think this is the first SNBU he’s banded that has been recovered by other banders in southern Ontario.