Man it’s been a frustrating Fall banding season at Ruthven! After a reasonably good day yesterday, we were hit with more of this damned great Fall weather and the catch plummeted….again. We ended up banding only 35 birds and encountered only 37 species throughout the morning. So I’ll work at trying to something positive….hmmmm….

Two things spring to mind:
The first is that we banded our first Northern Saw-whet Owl of the season last night. We only got one bird but it was enough to make the night worthwhile (as if the blazing stars weren’t enough!). This was an older ASY (After Second Year) bird, which was something of a surprise.

The second thing is that the “relaxed” pace allowed me to spend a lot of time teaching some budding young banders how to process the birds we were catching. We had a very fine group of young banders present: Ben, Tessa and Alesandra; I think all of them are in just in grade 9 but all have pretty good identification skills and all are intent on learning and take information in like a sponge. And Lisa is just as keen (although well past grade 9; in fact, she’s past undergrad studies). I think the only bird I got to band today was last night’s owl. The rest were done by this group of keeners. And that speaks well to the future of the program.

Banded 35:
1 Northern Saw-whet Owl
2 Golden-crowned Kinglets
3 Ruby-crowned Kinglets
5 Hermit Thrushes
3 American Robins
1 Cedar Waxwing
2 Myrtle Warblers
1 Northern Cardinal
3 Song Sparrows
5 White-throated Sparrows
2 Eastern White-crowned Sparrows
6 Dark-eyed Juncos
1 House Finch

ET’s: 37 spp.
Rick