Frankly, I’ve been getting pretty tired of listening to visitors say “What a lovely day it is!” Yeah, we’ve had a lot of them so far this Fall…..and our banding numbers for this Fall have been poor. Hmmmm…..do you think they might be connected? You bet they are. Nice warm weather does not provide any incentive for birds lingering in the north to make a concerted effort to head south. And when they do, they usually fly over our inland site or stay high in the treetops. On a lot of these “nice” days the woods have been empty…..eerily reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

But when the weather gets lousy – like last night and today – then it’s a different story and, for me, a much more pleasurable one. We had rain out our way for much of the night and it was teeming down when I arrived at 6:30. So I spent a couple of hours entering banding data. The weather radar map showed a “window of opportunity” mid morning – the rain was going to stop. Sure enough, the rain stopped for awhile. The wind picked up but was blowing from the ENE so some of the net lanes were sheltered. Nancy and I hustled out and opened the most protected…..and waited. Around noon we began to get a few Yellow-rumped Warblers that were foraging low, out of the wind. And then…the top blew off. In 2 hours we ended up banding 68 birds of 13 species, using just 4 net lanes (1A, 2, 4, 10). A large percentage were warblers, mostly Yellow-rumped. If we didn’t have to leave by 3 our catch would have been higher. Sixty-eight is our highest banding total of the Fall so far.

And in case you were feeling bad about the lack of baked goods that I whined about yesterday, don’t. We have access to the filming crew’s food truck:

Banded 68:
1 Eastern Wood Pewee
3 Black-capped Chickadees
8 Ruby-crowned Kinglets (all females)
2 Philadelphia Vireos
7 Tennessee Warblers
3 Nashville Warblers
3 Magnolia Warblers
33 Yellow-rumped Warblers
4 Blackpoll Warblers
1 American Redstart
1 Common Yellowthroat
1 White-throated Sparrow
1 Dark-eyed Junco

ET’s: 38 spp.
Rick