We had a burst of life blow through the banding area this morning – avian and human – and it was wonderful! On the human side: 5 youth, all under the age of 18, super keen to learn and take part; 6 very interested McMaster students from the same program that gave us Teegan Docherty and Christine Madliger (no slouches you must admit); 6 adept adults (2 a little long in the tooth) helping out and teaching and making things happen.

On the bird side: the grounds played host to large flocks of Cedar Waxwings (350 American Robins (150+), European Starlings (1,500+), Red-winged Blackbirds (800+), and Common Grackles (600+). The noise and the swirling of the flocks took your breath away. All except the Cedar Waxwings seemed to stay high in the treetops making an excited racket. The waxwings made forays lower down after grapes and we caught a lot of them, banding 63. This brought our season total for this species up to 852 – we have banded 3 or more (up to 153) waxwings every day in October. One of the nice things about Cedar Waxwings is that they’re a good bird for people to learn on. Most can be extracted from the nets readily; they’re easy to handle when processing them and not particularly aggressive (and those that are don’t “hurt”); aging and sexing them is fairly straightforward and can be picked up quickly. As a result the McMaster students (and the young people) had a chance to handle quite a few birds and you could see their skills and confidence growing with each one.

We had the nets open just before dawn and we were catching steadily. Then, around 9:00, it began to rain and we raced around and collapsed the nets on their poles. About an hour later the rain stopped and we reopened some (but not all) nets, just in time to get a big “hit” of waxwings. Then it began to rain again, and we reclosed the nets we’d opened. It was good to have a lot of hands available for this task. When we saw that the rain was here for the long haul, we went around and furled the nets until tomorrow. But if it hadn’t been for the rain we would have ended up banding multiple hundreds. When it was all done I just sat back and thought WOW! What a morning!

Banded 132:
1 Northern Saw-whet Owl (Nancy caught this on the first net check last night)
1 Mourning Dove
1 Brown Creeper
9 Golden-crowned Kinglets
3 Ruby-crowned Kinglets
3 Hermit Thrushes
12 American Robins
63 Cedar Waxwings
3 Myrtle Warblers
3 Song Sparrows
1 Swamp Sparrow
25 White-throated Sparrows
4 Dark-eyed Juncos
3 American Goldfinches

ET’s: 30 spp.

Rick