Birds of a Feather

It’s almost spring (YAY!!) and that means the migratory birds are on the move. And THAT means it’s almost time for my volunteer duties at the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory (PEPtBO – such an awkward acronym) bird banding station to start up again. I could not possibly be more excited!

Let me give you some background on the process of banding birds. First, this is undertaken for about 10 weeks in the spring as birds migrated in one direction, and again in the fall when the migrate in reverse. PEPtBO has two primary banders (that is, people who are interns or are paid to do this job). To start off the banding season, the two banders and any volunteers who care to help get together one afternoon to set up 30 nets for catching birds. These nets are maybe, hmmm, 20 or 30 feet long and 10 feet high? (I am bad at estimating distance.) The nets are stretched between sets of poles that are securely tied to nearby trees for stability. The nets are “furled” once they are set up, which is just a fancy way of saying they are rolled up. To roll them you have to bat them a bunch of times with your hand to get them to wind up. Hard to describe. Anyway, once all 30 nets are set up and furled, they are good to go.

Aside: I can never say or hear the word ‘furled’ without intoning “Mirab, his sails unfurled.” If you know, you know.

Once banding season officially starts, every single day for 10 weeks the workers and volunteers go out at sunrise and unfurl the nets. Every 40 minutes from then on, we walk a route that passes all 30 nets and we retrieve any birds that have been caught, put them in a cloth bag (to keep them calm), and take them back to the main cabin to be logged in a database, banded, and then released.

The nets stay open for exactly 6 hours, so we walk the net circuit 9 times – a grand total of about 10-15km depending on how many birds there are to be extracted. If the observatory has visitors, one of the banders might take the banded birds outside using a “photographers hold” to do a mini educational talk, if there is time before the next net run. At the end of the 6 hours, the nets are furled back up until the next morning, when it starts all over with the same staff and a fresh crew of volunteers.

As volunteers, we help with any / all steps of this process, although to be a bander, you need to be able to positively identify about 200 different species of birds (at least 40 of which are Warblers) as well as determine age, sex, and fat deposit (which is an indicator of how close the birds are to packing up and moving on). To add to the fun of identification, these species vary vastly between babies, young birds, mature males, and mature females, AND between spring and fall migration periods.

Without further ado, I showed up for my first birding shift (I had gone the day before to help set up the nets as well, because why not!). The other volunteer that day was a seriously experienced woman who has been doing this for 20 years (!!!) which meant I got lots of attention from the banders. They taught me how to hold the birds – this is an alarming-looking technique that involves holding the bird in your hand with its wings secured in your palm and its head held between your index and middle fingers. Alarming-looking because it seems like you must be choking the birds. In fact it turns out you don’t have much strength squeezing your index and middle fingers together (go ahead – try it out!). It also takes very little force to hold birds this way because their wings are held down and so they don’t tend to struggle. For my first test, I was given one bird to “try” (outside, in case I accidentally let it go) and … no problem! For test #2, I had to move my bird from one hand to the other, which is a bit more tricky, but again no problem!

Because I was so awesome on the handling part (haha), the banders let me take a bird out of the next on my second net run – a red-eyed vireo – and let me just say, there was no looking back after that!! On my second shift, I was the only volunteer and there were only about 20 birds caught over the entire 6 hours (the biggest day they ever had was around 900, to give you a sense of scale), so the banders let me extract every bird, for practice. I also learned the “photographers hold” which you see in every picture included in this post.

I love this job so much. I live an hour away from the Observatory, so I actually have to get up an hour before sunrise to be there on time. Totally don’t care! 🙂 I’m now trying to learn how to identify the species but it’s a lot of memory, and my memory is bad these days. Let’s assume it’s an age thing. However, I can add bits at a time to a store of knowledge – like I can tell a flycatcher from a warbler now by the shape of its bill. Also, song sparrows differ from field sparrows in that field sparrows have more of a “pink” bill and song sparrows are more brown. Yep, I’m a regular ornithologist!

Spring migration starts in a month, so that might be a good time to mute my Facebook account if you want to limit your exposure to bird pics! However, if bird pics are your thing, here’s a gallery of some of my favourites from last fall!

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