Last Day at Fry's Landing

Short Banding Day

Yesterday's banding at Fry's Landing was interrupted some really strong wind gusts that made me look up  at the cottonwoods and wonder which branch was going to fall directly on top of our banding table. Thankfully, that didn't occur, but the high winds and threat of rain caused us to shut down banding at 10:30 AM.

With only 4 hours of banding, we only caught 18 birds (12 new, 6 recaps). We did catch this Yellow-bellied Flycatcher.

And a nice ASY male Indigo Bunting. It looks like he replaced all of his secondaries, but did retain the outer two greater wing coverts. If you scroll down to the bottom of my post from the 28th, there's another wing photograph of an SY male for comparison.

We do focus on the birds, but every now and then something else flies into our nets.

When caught, dragonflies will start chewing on the net, getting their mandibles so entangled that it's seldom possible to get them out in one piece. This individual was lucky, in that Ruth, Joan and Sam were willing and able to free it and then remove the remaining strands of mesh from its mandibles. Their patience and the judicious use of scissors (it was an old and much abused mist net) completed the first successful dragonfly extraction of the season.

Other wildlife activity in the area included several nesting turtles. This female was laying eggs right next to our net lanes. There were at least three other females in the area looking for a safe place to dig a nest.

Unfortunately, Most turtle nests end up feeding the local skunks and raccoons. This snapping turtle nest had been raided a day or so ago.

I saw at least two other nests that had been dug up, so I'm not terribly optimistic about the outcome for the nests that I did see being initiated. Turtles live for decades and there are masses of them in the bay. They don't need that many successful nests to maintain their populations, but it's still sad to see all that effort go to waste. And few things are cuter than a baby turtle. 

The best thing we can do to help the turtles and other small animals is avoid feeding raccoons, skunks and opossums, whether intentionally (feeding) or inadvertently (not disposing of our garbage properly). When more of them to survive on Presque Isle than the environment can support under normal circumstances means other species like these turtles suffer the consequences.