Yes, it’s all over but the crying. I feel a little like I used to as a kid when I’d be standing close to the train tracks watching a freight train blow by. A big whoosh and then an emptiness as it rushed by, getting ever smaller and more distant….until it was gone.

This year’s Spring Migration was a tough one, fraught with many mornings of waiting and of heightened expectations and then afternoons of profound disappointment.

April was cold throughout and the general feeling was that the birds were being “held up”. And then May came with clear skies and warm temperatures, the dam burst, and the birds flew over in huge numbers….but we saw very few of them. Let’s face it, neotropical migrants don’t want to be at Ruthven (unless they’re breeding locally); they want to get to their nesting grounds as quickly as possible. The early bird gets the territory…and the female that it attracts. So it’s a case of “make hay while the sun shines” – if the conditions are good, push on through. And so they did.

Ironically, if we had had a few days like yesterday, with the cold and rain, in the first 2 weeks of May, our banding numbers would have been considerably higher. Such conditions produce “fallouts” and we would have seen a lot more migrants as they sat out the bad weather feeding down low out of the wind. But, instead, we suffered day after day of wonderful weather.

Banding effort has gradually changed at Ruthven over the years, especially since I retired and have been able to go at it more hardcore. One way I use to compare the years is to look at the rate of capture: birds banded per 100 net hours. [One 12 meter net open for 1 hour = 1 net hour]. We had the worst May and the worst overall total ever in terms of birds caught per 100 net hours: 20.1 for May; 19.1 for the season. Our largest one day catch was 84 birds, on May 5th – usually our big catch is 5-7 days later.

Our total of 1,604 birds banded was just “average”. Warblers made up only 18% of the catch and if you take the locally-breeding Yellow Warbler out of this total, warblers made up only 12.8%.

You might begin to ask whether these figures reflect an overall drop in the number of neotropical migrants period. And there’s many studies to indicate that this is the case. But Bruce Murphy and Joanne Goddard, banding colleagues at Hilliardton Marsh in the New Liskeard area, were getting record numbers of warblers (eg, >200 Wilson’s Warblers compared to our 2) and they were getting them early! I think the dynamic that reduced our catch the most was that damned good weather…..

One interesting non-bird statistic was that the number of visitors in April and May exceeded the number of birds banded by 58!

For those of you following our Killdeer pair: the one remaining chick is still alive and well and about three quarters the size of its parents. It hangs around in the vicinity of the male in the parking lot. And the adults? Mother Killdeer is sitting on another clutch of 4 eggs in just about the same spot. Make hay while the sun shines….

We finished off the season with a splendid picnic (indoors to keep dry and warm). Thanks to everyone – volunteers and visitors – for a lovely season.!!

Rick