my sandbox

Last weekend Victor and I went banding in Yosemite.

We stayed with our buddy Bob, at his gracious and well-appointed field house in Groveland. The house’s main attraction was its large stone porch. Over the course of their field season many person-hours were logged on that porch by Bob and his field crew, and we did our best to boost the number during our visit.

This is a fairly typical scene.  Bob’s the one sucking down the beer; Ben was a member of Bob’s field crew this summer working on a willow flycatcher survey:

Of course, sitting on the porch was not in fact our primary mission. We banded some birds as well. We joined interns Craig, Bucky, Lanaye, and Jordan at Crane Flat and banded there for six hours. One of the highlights that day was a Lazuli Bunting:

When we band, we set up ten mistnets in established locations around the stations. We make a circuit to check the nets once every 40 minutes, and we extract whatever birds we come across as we’re doing our checks. That day, we had a rather impressive 23 birds in one net at the same time: it was pretty busy.

Here’s what a mistnet looks like:

I think I was taking a Lincoln’s sparrow out of the net in this picture but I’m not quite sure. Here’s what a bird caught in a net looks like:

Once we get the birds out of the nets, we bring them back to our banding station in small cloth bags. We put a band on each bird (unless it has been recaptured, in which case we record the band number) and determine the bird’s age and sex, along with some other data. The data goes to The Institute for Bird Populations, where Victor and I used to work. The data are used to estimate survivorship and productivity of the species that we catch: in other words, researchers at IBP can examine trends in populations of these birds with the banding data collected by folks at this station and around 500 others across North America.

Anyhoo, Victor went out with the interns the next day to Gin Flat, which is a higher elevation site. I hung back at the house cause the site was a hike-in, so we weren’t able to bring Arty (dogs are not allowed on trails in the park) and I didn’t want to leave him tied up outside all alone. But, the star of that day’s banding was a Williamson’s sapsucker, which I was sorry to miss as he’s a fairly impressive specimen:

So, there you have it.