Another clear, cool morning. The first round was huge, using up all the bags….and I was by myself so I called my wife, Marg, who hurried over to help scribe and, later, to extract. (She was a pretty good bander in her heyday.) We worked our way through that lot pretty efficiently, handled the dribs and drabs that then filtered through and then went to close the nets – only to find 40 birds, mostly Cedar Waxwings, in Net #6! It just seems that waxwings do this hari kari thing: when one of their group goes into a net, the alarm calls that result entice the rest of the flock to throw themselves into the net as well. Misery loves company, as my Grandmother used to say.

We continue to rack up notable achievements:
• We cleared the 5,000 banded bird for the Year; we’re at 5,079. This does NOT include the 1,000+ Snow Buntings, Horned Larks, and Lapland Longspurs that we did in January and February. [We banded these through Ruthven’s banding program but not right at Ruthven.]
• We had our 2,000th visitor for the year: Morgan Fenton from Wainfleet. She visited the program last week with her class and was so enthused that she talked her mother into bringing her back again today. We’ll send a field guide off to her this week.

Banded 133:
2 Black-capped Chickadees
1 Brown Creeper
1 Winter Wren
5 Golden-crowned Kinglets
6 Ruby-crowned Kinglets
11 American Robins
43 Cedar Waxwings
13 Myrtle Warblers
1 Northern Cardinal
1 American Tree Sparrow
1 Chipping Sparrow
1 Fox Sparrow
8 Song Sparrows
17 White-throated Sparrows
17 Dark-eyed Juncos
2 Purple Finches
1 House Finch
2 American Goldfinches

Retrapped 6:
2 Downy Woodpeckers
1 Northern Flicker
1 Hermit Thrush
2 Dark-eyed Juncos

ET’s: 37 spp..
Rick