Fall 2011: Weeks 3 and 4

As you might imagine, banding has been largely at a standstill. Week 3 was very hot, limiting banding to only a couple of hours in the morning. Week 4 so far has been -- and looks to be -- completely rained out. A low pressure system (the remnants of tropical depression Lee) has been stalled just to our east, unable to move as Hurricane/Tropical Storm Katia moves up the Atlantic. Not much we can do but wait out the weather. Here are a few birds we banded when the conditions cooperated.

American Redstarts are quite numerous this fall. Most are young birds. Some young males and females can't be told apart. Male redstarts look a lot like females for an entire year. However, a few have more boldly colored orange patches on the sides, which you can just make out in this photo.

 

Wilson's Warblers are also common early migrants here. The young females show barely any trace of the dark black cap of males.

Yellow-bellied Flycatchers are a personal favorite of mine. It is really hard to capture their true lemony-olive color, but this photo comes close. Notice that their heads look too big for their bodies -- this can be a good field mark, especially when combined with the color.

I did take a look at the previous RRBO data and compared it to our August data to see if my hunch that birds seemed to have nested a little later, based on molt patterns, was correct. I mentioned this in my previous post. I examined all hatching-year birds banded in August 1992-2010. About 13% of those birds had not yet started their first post-juvenile molt. For August 2011, it was 26%. So it does seem that a lot of the juvenile birds we caught in August were a week or so younger than in previous years.

We hope to be able to resume banding over the weekend.