Bird Banding in the Preserve with Jackie Sandberg – August 10, 2019

Jackie Sandberg, front middle, with her crew.

Saturday, August 10, was a beautiful morning. While the field trip to the bird-banding station at the Biocore Prairie started at 7AM, Jackie Sandberg (Wildlife Rehabilitation Training Coordinator) and her crew of volunteer banders had started hours earlier, setting up the 8 mist nets to catch the birds, the table of information for the visitors, and the picnic table with all the tools and reference books where the real work was done. Our visitors were treated to watching continuous banding, usually two birds at a time, before the 10:00 finish with a total of 22 birds banded, identified, measured, and assessed for age and health. The visitors had an opportunity to help go on net checks and sometimes releasing the birds after banding. It was a joy to see the delight in the faces of our younger visitors as they saw the birds up close or got to release a bird. The bird-banders, in spite of their focus on collecting the data quickly so as not to overly stress the birds, did a great job explaining what they were doing and answering questions.  We all learned so much!  

---

In addition to putting a band on the leg of each bird, the birds were weighed, measurements made of flight feathers, tail feathers, beak dimensions, and general observations made of the fat deposits and condition of the feathers.  Reference books were used for identification of each bird, and once identified, a reference page for each species gave more detailed information, for example, shape of the tail feathers, markings for juveniles. It was fun listening in on discussions among the bird-banders as they helped each other learn and make decisions. Who would have guessed that blowing on the feathers on the body of the bird would reveal so much information about age, health, whether there is a brood patch, etc! All the data are entered into a spread sheet, which eventually goes to the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center which monitors the status and trends of migratory and resident birds in North America. The data are used, among other things, to answer questions about breeding, population increases or decreases, general health of bird populations, movement of individual birds (we saw two previously banded birds!).For more information, see https://www.friendslakeshorepreserve.com/bird-observatory.html

Biocore Prairie Prairie in early morning light. Photo A.. Koziol

The hours passed quickly!  In this bird-banding session, we saw a number of common yellow throat warblers (several of them very young!), several types of sparrows, a fly catcher, chickadees, three species of wren (marsh wren, sedge wren, house wren). I was glad our 13 visitors got to experience this process and I hope this description entices others to attend future bird-banding “field trips”. I highly recommend this to people of all ages, but particularly to parents with young children. I was told, however, that the mist nets don’t always catch as many birds. We were lucky today with 22 birds- last week they banded 48, but sometimes there are only a few. The 7 volunteer bird banders are an impressive group, and Jackie is a wonderful leader and educator!  ​Report by Friends Host Lillian Tong. Photos by Lillian Tong and Arlene Koziol.