Congratulations to Joanne Goddard in Timiskaming who just received her banding Sub-Permit. . - B. Murphy

From Alex Anctil in Rimouski:
Hi Rick,
Not much has happen since the last time. SNBU numbers have been quite
low at my place. For 2 or 3 dys in a row I had only 2 individuals that
were already banded. Yesterday I had a little more action, but I had
to leave for Québec city this morning. I will probably trap again on
Thursday. We are now at 222 SNBU.
Alex

From Simon Duvall in Montreal:
Hi Rick,
Well, we haven’t done any banding since we ended our Mirabel site. We haven’t had a good snowstorm in the last few weeks and the snow cover is very reduced. We will resume banding if we get some snow and visit one site near Sherbrooke and maybe another one north of Montreal.
Simon

From Bruce Murphy in Timiskaming:
There is not much to report from the north. While we have abundant snow cover the buntings are throwing a few curves at us. We had 200 buntings feeding at our new site at Kerns public school. We could not band until today Monday but we kept slapping the feed down. Yesterday the flock dimisnished to 30 birds and today when we went to band there were only 12 birds present. Not to be discouraged we went to our other site where there had been about 60 birds two days ago and they were absent!!!!! Is this behaviour normal ? Temperatures have been very mild and it was beautiful and sunny for the past 2 days. We are a bit perplexed and hope to get all of this figured out soon and hopefully the buntings will return in good numbers. We put the traps out upside down in the Kerns station to acclimatize the birds to the traps beside the feed piles . If the traps have made the buntings skittish then they would have been worse if we had put then over the corn.

On a positive note we just heard the good news that our Joanne Goddard just received her permit so we now have 3 licensed banders ready to band snow buntings, we just need the birds. We will not have the chance to band this weekend as we will be attending the Ontario bird banding association conference where we will be connecting with snow bunting banders and supporting one another as best as we can in this buntingless winter of 2012. .
best of luck, Bruce Murphy

PS: We are at 33.