Presque Isle State Park Bird Banding

Banding Highlights from May 5th and 7th

I'm very excited to be keep you all up to date on our exciting banding season this year. Since Sarah's post, we have had 2 more days of successful bird banding. Matt Phillips ran the banding station at Fry's on Sunday the 5th. I can tell you that I am a little jealous in his epic morning of netting ten Nashville warblers! TEN!! Other highlights on Sunday included a swamp sparrow, blue-winged warbler, and gray-cheeked thrush! There was a great turnout of visitors and I am sorry that I couldn't have been one of them.

On Tuesday, May 7th, I banded at Niagara Launch. While Fry's sometimes offers a more interesting mix of migrant species, Niagara consistently provides us with pure "banding gold:" RECAPTURES. Recapture, capturing an already banded bird from a previous day, year, or location, is often the ultimate goal of a banding project. While the information we gain from banding new individuals is valuable and can help us determine trends in species abundance, and timing of migration, molt, and breeding activities; recaptures provides scientists us with very valuable data regarding survival, migration routes, and a variety of other life history and population information. All of our banding data is submitted to the nation wide database administered by the Bird Banding Laboratory at Patuxent: http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbl/index.cfm which gives scientists around the world access to the information we collect right here at Presque Isle State Park. At Niagara, we literally did strike gold with 4 beautiful golden-colored yellow warblers which had been banded in previous years and a male northern cardinal. I still need to check our records, so stay tuned to find out when and where these birds were first banded. Other species included eastern towhee, gray catbird, American robin, and a very bitey brown-headed cowbird.

 See you at Fry's on Friday! (weather permitting).
Jason

Photo: A recaptured ASY (after-second-year) female yellow warbler.