Capture Highlights and Off-Sites

Let me start with some of our capture highlights from the past week: Black Phoebe, Golden-crowned Sparrow, Lincoln’s Sparrow, Sharp-shinned Hawk, American Robin, and an entire nuclear family of Townsend’s Warblers.

Adult female American Robin

The Golden-crowned Sparrows (GCSP) are particularly interesting because of an annual “welcome back” party that we have at the station. Apparently we will all make golden crowns and eat and drink golden food to celebrate their return to their wintering grounds. Part of the party is betting on when we think the first one will be caught in our Palomarin (Palo) nets (as opposed to our other sites). Anyone who chooses to enter picks a day, net run time, and specific net (for tie-breakers). We’ve caught GCSPs at two of our off-sites, but so far none at Palo. Sadly my chosen date has already passed (they gave us a graph on the date of first capture from the last 20+ years, and according to the historical data they are running a little behind schedule now).

Golden-crowned Sparrow

The Sharp-shinned Hawk was great because it meant that I got to THROW ANOTHER BIRD! It’s amazing how much smaller it was than the Cooper’s Hawk. Both species generally look the same, and one of the ways to distinguish them in the hand is by measuring the wing chord, but even just looking at this guy I could tell it was only like a third of the size of the Cooper’s Hawk (which was on the border between male and female, based on wing chord (I can’t remember what we ended up calling it)). It was also a hatch year male, so it was just smaller overall (males are smaller than females).

The nuclear family of Townsend’s Warblers (TOWA) was also pretty great because they are beautiful birds, but also it allowed us to directly compare an adult male and female and a hatch year male and female. TOWAs are one species where you can use plumage to help determine both age and sex of an individual (some you can only determine age, some only sex, some neither, etc), so this was really nice to be able to compare them up close.

Adult female (left) and male (right) TOWAs. Female has predominantly olive crown and face with some black mottling, whereas male is predominantly black. Male also has large black spots in the centers of his back feathers (female has very small spots) - difficult to see in this picture. Female has very thin vertical black lines through the white feathers in the top white bar of her wing, whereas male has no lines (also difficult to see).

I should probably explain more about our off-sites since I mentioned them with the GCSPs. Our main station is here at Palo, where the staff offices, Visitor’s Center/Banding Lab, and our bunkhouse are. There are 20 nets that we operate at the station, and we band here every day except for Mondays. We also have five “off-sites” that are located in the surrounding area, anywhere from a 10 minute walk to a 45 minute drive (most lean toward the latter). We band at each of those sites once a week, and they each have either 10 or 11 nets. The closest one (“Uppers”) is just up a hill from our station, and it’s the site that’s covered in poison oak. Whoever goes up there isn’t allowed in the office until they shower first, to avoid getting poison oak oils all over the furniture. We have a designated “poison oak bench” for people waiting to use the shower, or who want to sit down to take their shoes off, but otherwise they’re not really allowed to touch anything. Pine Gulch is the next closest – only a 10-15 minute drive. However, the site is a popular city park along the Bolinas Lagoon, so we have to completely pack up all of our poles and ropes (to avoid them being stolen) rather than leaving them lying around like we do at the other sites. That means that we have to go there the afternoon prior to working there to hide the poles and ropes in the bushes where we’ll set up the nets the following day, so that we don’t have to do all of that the morning of. It’s in a great location, though, so we get to see a lot of shorebirds throughout the morning. Lagunitas Creek is another site about 30 minutes away. It’s got nice, short net trails so we have plenty of time to get back and process birds, or do some birding of our own. Redwood Creek is about 40 minutes away and seems to be one of the better sites, or perhaps I’m biased (it’s where we caught a Red-shafted Flicker and an American Redstart (our first vagrant of the season, meaning it’s off-course from its normal migration route and shouldn’t really be in this area)). It’s also just a nice site and seems to get some decent catches overall, but we did discover a developing yellow jacket nest along one of our trails (after Bobby and I each got stung a few times) and had to reroute the trail. The last site is Muddy Hollow, which is 45 minutes away. That site is cool because there is pretty consistently a herd of elk that grazes on the nearby hill when we arrive, so we get to watch them for a few minutes before they retreat. It also seems to have some higher catch rates compared to our other sites, but I think it varies on a day-to-day basis.

It’s getting somewhat close to my bedtime (yes, I know that it’s only 9:45pm), but in the interest of not falling too far behind in my updates, I’ll just post this rather short entry for now. Next time I’ll tell you about the surrounding area and what I do around here for fun!

Pacific giant salamander!