Nothin’ says it’s over like empty net lanes. We took down the remaining 6 nets this morning. Of course we had opened them and waited long enough to see if we might get a few more. And we did: 2 recently hatched American Robins and a female Common Grackle with a brood patch and a nasty tumour(?) on its belly.
And speaking of nasty….it has been a nasty Spring Season. I’m not going to belabour this theme – I’ve done enough of that already. But…I think a quick look at the numbers will tell the story. We banded 374 vs an average of 571 in the previous 5 years. Both April and May were well below average. I keep track of the “flow” of birds through the site by calculating the birds banded per 100 net hours (1 twelve meter net open for an hour is a “net hour”). The 5-year April average was 35.2 birds per 100 net hours; this year 26.8. But May was the kicker. The bulk of migrants go through in May…right? May numbers are always bigger than April’s….right? The 5-year May average is 39.7 per 100 net hours; this year just 16.9!!
Another thing I track is the “largest daily catch” – the day with the most birds banded. The average has been 47 birds and all of those days were in May. This year the largest catch was in April and was just 19 – again, a reflection on how poor May was for us.
There’s no question that these results were the direct result of the long strings of bad weather we experienced over the two months (cold, rainy, wet). But what is unclear is how migrating birds dealt with these conditions and, in doing so, missed our site. My hunch is that birds south of us, and probably south of Lake Erie, would get bunched up by conditions and when an opportunity presented itself exploded and made for the north shore of Lake Ontario…at least, getting as far as they could to make up for lost time. Interestingly, I was catching more birds with just 5 nets at the Fern Hill campuses in Burlington and Oakville (north of Lake Ontario) than at the Farm. Let’s hope this Spring’s weather was just an exception, an anomaly. But the way things have been going….I’m just not confident that it was.
Still, I had an interesting sighting first thing this morning. I opened the remaining nets at dawn and was just settling down in one of the comfortable lawn chairs, ready to take in that magical half hour of dawn chorus and fresh temperatures and the smells of wildness when I spotted two birds winging their way directly toward the field station: a pair of Common Loons?! I look for loons in April not at the end of May. When I do see them they tend to be solitary birds or, if there’s several, spread out from each other at some distance. But these birds were close to each other – within 2 meters. One was an adult in full breeding plumage while the other was (I’m assuming) a young bird in basic or non-breeding plumage…..following a parent to the breeding lakes in northern Ontario? Learning the route?
A BIG SHOUT OUT TO ALL THE FOLKS THAT VOLUNTEERED THEIR TIME TO MAKE THIS SEASON, IF NOT OVERLY PRODUCTIVE, VERY ENJOYABLE. YOU WERE FUN TO BE WITH. THANKS!!
Rick