November 7th – The Fat Lady Has Sung……

I always thought the phrase, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings was a Yogi Berraism but….no…it ain’t. Evidently it refers to the final aria, sung by the buxom, horn-helmeted Brunnhilde, in a Wagner opera, Gottendammerung. It was originally used by a sports commentator when he was witnessing a dramatic comeback in a football game. Who knew?

Bottom line though…..the 2016 Fall Migration Monitoring season came to an end today (although banding, now and again, will continue at Ruthven for owls and wintering birds until the Snow Buntings arrive and take up all of our time).

And just as it should be we finished with equal number of juncos and tree sparrows – 8 of each; regular Winter residents at Ruthven.

Ruthven; Banded 20:
8 American Tree Sparrows
8 Dark-eyed Juncos
1 House Finch
3 American Goldfinches

ET’s: 29 spp.

Owling At Fern Hill Oakville:

Although the actual school site is pretty barren ecologically speaking (we – staff and students – are working to change that), it sits close to a sizeable woodlot and river valley. So I took the portable sound system to see if we could pull some Saw-whets out of this better habitat. As luck would have it, we got a Saw-whet on the very first net round – an early one! (Very unlike Ruthven where it seems we don’t get them until later into the night.) We were skunked on the next round and on the 3rd discovered that the sound system had run out of juice – Katherine learning the lesson that Dollar Store battery specials maybe aren’t such a good buy after all. Still, we did get one owl and my sense is that it will yield good numbers in years to come.

Daytime Banding at Fern Hill Burlington:
Here are the totals from today’s banding.
Banded: 19
BCCH – 2
ATSP – 1
SOSP – 1
SCJU – 8
AMGO – 7

ET’s: 21 spp.

Plus we recaptured a 4/5 year old chickadee and a Downy Woodpecker that had smelled like gasoline in the spring when it was banded (we couldn’t find out the source of the gasoline).

Janice Chard