On the evening of the 28th all the current winter banding interns, plus Kathleen, the fall education and outreach intern, got together to make gingerbread houses. I was housesitting over the holidays, so we had a great set up for spreading out and enjoying ourselves. We made the batter, let it chill, ate an excellent meal, and then came back to bake and construct our houses. I’d say that the results were satisfactory… and even better than we were all expecting. There was definitely something in that frosting mixture. It worked like tacky glue. I kept the recipe for future construction projects.
This is the view in the morning from where we band birds at Pine Gulch. Pine Gulch is a Bolinas town park that sits on the lagoon.
While there this past week I extracted and processed an adult male Anna’s Hummingbird. Holding him in my hand took a little getting used to. He was only slightly thicker around than a cigar would be. And he squirmed. You can’t hold hummingbirds in the usual “bander’s grip” with two fingers around the neck because they’re too small. And they’ll flap their wings like mad. So instead, you hold them by placing a thumb over one wing, and a finger (or two) over the other. Getting one of those wings out to measure its length was another trick. This male was not happy with me. He was scolding me while I was processing him.
The last net run of the day at Pine Gulch I had no birds, until I got to the last net… where as I approached I saw three birds. Those three quickly multipled to 11 as a large group of birds foraging on the ground near the net suddenly spotted me approaching and took off. I watched as countless birds flew straight into the net. Some bounced out, but a large number were caught. I called Nora for backup to help get the birds out faster. We worked quickly extracting them, then carried them all back to the banding station…
About 8 of the birds were Oregon Juncos that had never been caught and banded before. A few were young White Crowned Sparrows, and two were Ruby-crowned Kinglets. We had our work cut out for us. It was a busy winter day at Pine Gulch. We processed 33 birds throughout the banding hours.
New Year’s Eve Colin and I banded at Palo… and had 5 times as many visitors as birds… Luckily the majority of the visitors seemed to show up when we had caught a bird and could show them what we do. (Besides just tossing a knotted up bird bag into a mist net to demonstrate how they work.)
New Year’s Eve at night we celebrated the birds’ “birthdays.” From now on there will be no more birds classified as “Hatch Years” when we age them… At least until the breeding season is underway and there are new fledglings. We made wishes and blew out candles on our cupcakes. We also had a ping pong tournament in the library… and Nora kicked all our butts.
At midnight we went for a dip in the Pacific. It was cold. But it was so worth it…
I enjoyed the water and waves so much I went back for more in my rubber boots shortly after putting some warm clothes back on.
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