It sure didn’t feel like the middle of May today – more like the end of March. Rain fell off and on throughout most of the morning. When it was off, we opened a few sheltered nets; when it was on we quickly collapsed them. Mother Nature was toying with us. Still, we caught enough birds to demonstrate to the many visitors at the station what we do and how we do it.
The most commonly banded bird this morning was the Rose-breasted Grosbeak. It’s Winter range extends down as far as Colombia in South America. What a journey it must make – in both directions! And some of the older retraps have made the trip numerous times. Wouldn’t you love to be able to know where they travelled exactly and what they saw? At the end of March I flew back to Canada from Costa Rica. I was struck by the extent of light pollutions I experienced throughout the eastern U.S. How do birds, which have spent a whole Winter in night-time darkness, handle this? Does the light make things easier or more difficult?
And speaking of Costa Rica…..we banded an Eastern Kingbird today. When I was on the NE coast of that country, close to Tortoguero, I saw flocks of Eastern Kingbirds migrating north along the shore of the Caribbean. I wondered at the time about their route: when they get to the NE corner of Nicaragua do they a) head out NW over the water to the Yucatan; b) head NE toward Cuba; c) head W to follow the coast around and up through Mexico?
So many questions, so little time.
Between showers we banded 38 birds:
1 Eastern Kingbird
2 Gray Catbirds
2 Blue-winged Warblers
9 Yellow Warblers
1 Magnolia Warbler
6 Yellow-rumped Warbler
1 Western Palm Warbler
1 Black & White Warbler
3 Common Yellowthroats
10 Rose-breasted Grosbeaks
2 Baltimore Orioles
ET’s: 62 spp.
Photo Gallery:
Rick
Local photographer, Gail MacLellan, takes great pictures of birds but her real interest lies below the surface of the vernal pools or sloughs that abound on the Haldimand Clay Plain. At Ruthven she will sit for hours painstakingly waiting for subsurface drama to unfold. Here she talks about a common organism found in these pools, fingernail Clams.
Fingernail Clams
Fingernail clams that inhabit vernal pools, temporary woodland pools.
A fingernail clam moves slowly along the murky bottom of a vernal pool and burrows in the mud by extending and contracting its foot, a muscular appendage. To breathe, it extracts oxygen from the water with gills. An efficient filter-feeder, the clam sucks up the rich soup of the pool through a tubular siphon, filtering out food particles, namely algae and bits of leaf litter that were broken down by other leaf-eaters. Wastewater is expelled from another siphon.
When summer comes and vernal pools dry up, the young clams burrow deep down in the muck and enter diapause ? their development is put on hold. However, if the pool refills with water from autumn rains, the clams will become active again.
These tiny clams provide food for other residents of vernal pools, such as snails, and visitors like salamanders, raccoons, and shorebirds
Gail