Birds in the Hand

I had been meaning to post this for a while. You know how life gets busy.

Last Saturday, my wife and I tagged along with Ross Dawkins1 to band birds. Ross is a chemist by trade, but has banded over 164,000 birds since he started some 35 years ago.

Some of you may wonder — what is bird banding and why band birds? We setup lines of fine-meshed nets, and then carefully take the birds out, slap a near weightless aluminum band that contains a unique number around their leg, record some information about the bird, and then let it go.

The idea is to catch birds again that are already banded. Most of what you catch are birds that you’ve banded yourself. But everynow and then, you catch a bird that’s been banded somewhere else, or someone catchs one of your birds. For example, the other day Ross recently a Swamp Sparrow that was banded on Whitefish Point, Michigan (which is on the upper peninsula).

By keeping track of this information, you get an idea how long different species can live in the wild, and how they move around. For example, Ross was telling me that the first record of Mississippi Kite in Bolivia was banded in San Angelo. (A kid unfortunately shot the bird, noticed the band, brought it to a priest, and the information made it’s way back to the US). In another case, a White-winged Dove that was banded on the Texas coast was recaptured in Guatamala. We’d have no way of knowing that a bird in Guatamala had been in Texas, if not for the banding.

The location we were at was Dan Brown’s hummer house near Cristoval, TX, in Tom Green County. He has an estimated population of 2,500 Black-chinned Hummingbirds that nest on his property, and has become a favorite place to visit for birders all around the state. He uses 800 lbs of sugar a summer, in making his sugar water for his feeders. With one cup sugar to four cups water, that’s thousands and thousands of gallons of sugar water each summer. He also feeds 20 to 30 tons of corn to deer and turkey. It’s quite a place.

We setup nets down by the creek and by Dan’s house. Most of what we caught was pretty common, but there were a few nice things. In particular, I accompanied Ross the day before when we caught a Brown Creeper. (I brought my camera only to realize that my memory card had gotten left at the house). Also on Saturday, I saw an adult Red-headed Woodpecker along the Concho River, which may be common for you birders out east, but is a dang good bird here in west Texas.

One of the things I enjoyed most was catching lots of Hermit Thrushes.

These birds are a member of the robin family and spend their winters in Texas. We caught six or seven of them in the nets, more than you’d see in the field in a given morning of birding.

Be sure to check out the picture gallery to see all the pictures, including the red in a Ruby-crowned Kinglet and a Northern Cardinal that literally plays dead.