As I posted a couple of days ago, we had quite a few days of unseasonably warm weather accompanying large numbers of birds – mostly sparrows – at the Farm. And then, it changed….winds swung around to the south and picked up, temperatures dropped, showers developed. And bird numbers plummeted. We continued to see sparrows bouncing over the grass heads but not nearly in the numbers we had been seeing them. And our catch of unbanded birds was greatly diminished. Some of this decrease in catch numbers was directly due to the fact that the gusting winds limited the number of nets we could open and the amount of time we could keep them open. (Under ideal conditions we might have 14 nets on the go; on the 18th, only 5 were manageable.)
One interesting thing we’re noticing is that we’re getting a lot of “retraps” – birds we’ve banded within the last month (some of them even earlier). There’s a large food supply here and up until recently there’s been no pressing need to leave it. But with the change of weather this will change. We’re still catching large numbers of previously banded birds but they are showing more fat and weighing more – clear signs that they are fattening up, getting ready to go.
October 18th; Banded 6:
2 Ruby-crowned Kinglets
1 Purple Finch
1 Field Sparrow
1 Red-winged Blackbird
1 Northern Cardinal
[5 retraps]
October 19th; banded 6:
1 Hermit Thrush
1 White-throated Sparrow
3 Song Sparrows
1 Swamp Sparrow
[22 retraps]
October 20th; Banded 16:
1 Ruby-crowned Kinglet
2 Purple Finches
1 White-throated Sparrow
8 Song Sparrows
3 Swamp Sparrows
1 Red-winged Blackbird
[61 retraps]
Rick