My First Month with Point Blue!!

This is long overdue, but hello from my internship at the Palomarin Field Station!! I started here a month ago (wow, it’s been that long already!), so I’ve had plenty of time to settle in and learn the ropes. I’m not sure where to start, so I’ll just dive in somewhere. My living situation: The field station has two main buildings – one with offices and the banding lab / visitor’s center, and the other with several bunkrooms and a kitchen for the interns or occasional visiting researcher. Normally the interns would share the two large bunkrooms, but two of the other interns (Bobby and Kaitlyn) came here as a couple, so they are in one of the small, private rooms. That means that the other intern (Wyatt) and I each have our own bunkroom, each complete with 5 beds. My bunkroom is technically a bit smaller than Wyatt’s (it still fits 5 beds, how small can it be?), but I basically get my own bathroom because the private room is on the same side of the building as Wyatt’s bathroom. (Each bathroom has direct access into one bunkroom and the outdoors.) Hooray! We were both sharing the rooms briefly while the last of the summer interns trickled out, but now we’ve got our own rooms. The kitchen is pretty wonderful, too, because it’s basically two kitchens. There are two fridges (three, if you count the communal/staff fridge outside), two sinks, two stoves, two ovens, a TON of cupboard space, and a big dinner table. SO nice having so much fridge space.

California Quail

So, on to my work. My work is based out of the Palomarin Field Station, which is part of the Point Blue Conservation Science organization. My main job is to run mist net stations to capture and band birds. I believe they are called “mist nets” because when they are set up they are fairly difficult to see, like mist. If you know what you’re looking for and focus on it, you can obviously see that it’s there, but the idea is that a bird will be focused on things in the distance and will fly right into it without seeing it first. Here at the station the nets are permanently set up along a trail through the surrounding area (and have been for almost 50 years!). We open the nets 15 minutes after sunrise and check them every 30 minutes for 6 hours, and then we close them until the next banding day (we furl the nets up so nothing can get caught in them, but we leave them attached to the poles). When it’s time for a net run, we check each net from end to end and extract any birds that are caught. The nets have 6 trammel lines running lengthwise that create pockets of netting, so that when a bird flies into the net it will fall into the pocket until we come along to take it out. Some extractions are easier than others – the bird might not actually be tangled at all, just stuck in the pocket, whereas others might be twisted and caught on every part possible. Some birds (chickadees, in particular) seem to figure that if they can’t get out themselves, then no one is going to get them out, so the grab on to as much netting as they can get their claws on. Wonderful. Once we get them out, we put them into bird bags (small, cotton bags with rope ties that we can secure the opening with) and bring them back to the banding lab.

Western Scrub-Jay

In the lab we start by identifying the species and then putting a band on it (you aren’t supposed to band birds that you can’t identify). We have different size bands so that we can put the appropriate size on anything from a hummingbird to an eagle. Each band has a unique number on it (like a license plate) so that if recaptured, the bird can be looked up in a database to see previous information and add new info. This is particularly helpful for looking at survival and population dynamics, among other things. The Bird Banding Laboratory issues all official bands for banding in North America, so if a bird banded in Canada was later recaptured in Mexico, the information would all be submitted to the same master database, making it easier to track individuals and monitor populations. Oh yeah, and the banding and measurements are all done while holding the bird in the “bander’s grip”, which means that you’ve got your index and middle fingers on either side of the bird’s head with its back against your palm and thumb wrapped around the wing so that it can’t flap and potentially injure itself (or escape). That way the legs are right out in front and you can hold onto a foot at the same time to easily get a band on.

Red-breasted Nuthatch

Anyways, after banding the bird (or recording the band number if it is a recapture), we try to determine the bird’s age. The main method that we use for ageing is called “skulling”, which involves blowing the head feathers apart to get a good window of skin to see the skull. Birds are born with one layer of thin, pinkish bone, and over the next few months a second, thicker layer ossifies. We move the skin around to look for a contrast between un-ossified pink areas and ossified white areas. If there IS a contrast, we know that the bird must have been born this year. However, if there ISN’T a contrast and the skull is completely ossified, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the bird is an adult, so we often have to look for other criteria to help us age it (plumage, eye color, shape of the tail feathers, amount of wear on the flight feathers, etc). Sometimes it is super easy to see the skull, and other times it’s impossible (birds that are molting head feathers, who have a lot of dander, or who have darker skin are particularly difficult to skull). Skulling is definitely the most difficult part of the banding process, and it’s about the only banding procedure that I hadn’t done before in Peru.

Townsend's Warbler

We also try to determine sex, which is often a lot easier because in many cases we just don’t have a way of figuring it out. For many birds, the only way to determine sex is if they have a brood patch (females) or a cloacal protrusion (males), both of which happen during the breeding season, which is basically over by now. (A brood patch is formed when nesting females lose their belly feathers to expose a big open area of skin to incubate her eggs with, and a cloaca is the opening where both poop and semen comes out, which gets enlarged in males during the breeding season.) Some species have differences in plumage between males and females, but often adult females may look like young males. There are sometimes differences in eye color, wing length, or weight that may indicate one or the other, but it all depends on the species.

The orange in the crown means that this Golden-crowned Kinglet is a male

After ageing and sexing the bird (or realizing that we can’t), we record the amount of fat on the bird, the presence and extent of body and flight feather molt, the wing chord, weight, the length of the tarsus (lower leg) of only our study species, and any extra notes pertinent to certain species (on some with colored crowns we measure the length of the crown as it helps determine the sex, and on flycatchers we record tail length and the difference in length between certain flight feathers as it’s the only way to determine the species!). We also put plastic color bands on our study species, which helps nest searchers in the spring/summer identify individuals in the field and know whose territory they are in. After all that is done, we release the bird! It seems like a lot, but we can usually do it in under 5 minutes if it’s an easy bird (easy to age and sex, that is), or a bit longer if it’s not.

Spotted Towhee

Some of our more common captures are Song Sparrows, Pacific-slope Flycatchers, Swainson’s Thrushes (which I caught a bunch of in Peru at the tail end of their migration – how cool!), Wrentits, Bushtits, Chestnut-backed Chickadees, Bewick’s Wrens, Pacific Wrens, Wilson’s Warblers, and Oregon Juncos. We also catch the occasional Steller’s Jay, Hairy Woodpecker, Brown Creeper, Hutton’s Vireo, Common Yellowthroat, Golden-crowned Kinglet, Red-breasted Nuthatch, and various others. We’re starting to get more Townsend’s Warblers, which breed up in Canada/Alaska and winter in this area down to Mexico. Just this past week we’ve started catching several Fox Sparrows, which also winter in this area. An exciting one for me was the Western Scrub-Jay, after having worked with the Florida Scrub-Jays for so long! There was also a Red-shafted Flicker that I accidentally scared into a net (banders would say it was expertly scared into the net), an American Redstart (our first vagrant of the fall), and a Cooper’s Hawk!

The Hawk was awesome – it was barely caught when I found it (bigger birds are rarely caught because the netting is too fine to actually catch on anything), but was kind of “swimming” around in the pocket that it was caught in. At first it looked like it’s foot was kind of tangled, but it was a very easy extraction. You can’t hold raptors in the “bander’s grip” because they could potentially have bones in their crop (a kind of food pouch near the throat) from small animals that they’ve eaten, so you have to hold it in a “raptor grip” by sticking your index finger between the upper legs, wrapping your thumb around one leg and squeezing your middle finger into your index finger around the other leg. Sounds more confusing than it is (finger – leg – finger – leg – finger). Anyways, I’m not really sure how I got it out so easily – I think it just decided to be very calm while I grabbed its legs (thankfully – those talons are nasty!). I got it out and managed to snap a couple pictures before putting a bag on its head to keep it calm and take it back to the banding lab. (You can’t put raptors entirely in bags because there often aren’t bags large enough, but more importantly you don’t want to lose a grip on the legs and have to find them again, because you’ll likely get a talon through your hand.) I had radioed back to Wyatt that I had “ONE EFFING AMAZING BIRD!” (we always radio back to our partners to let them know how many birds we’ve got coming back, if we need help with an extraction, or if we need help checking the rest of the nets while we work on an extraction). He went and got Bobby and Kaitlin, who had the day off but were fortunately hanging around the station, our boss, Renee, who came to help walk us through our first raptor banding, and the head honcho at our station, Geoff, who just wanted to watch. Raptors get special “lock-on” bands because they are able to rip the other bands off with their beaks. The lock-on bands are thicker and have a special lip that we bend over with a pair of plyers to “lock” the band in place that they can’t remove. It also means that it’s a two person job – one person to hold the bird still (me) and one to get the band on and locked (Wyatt). The BEST part was releasing the bird. With passerines you just put a hand under them to support them in case they don’t want to fly off immediately and open the hand that’s gripping them and they take off. Raptors, however, are much heavier birds, so they’ll drop if you just let go of them. Instead, you have to THROW THEM! I got into an open area outside of the banding lab, pulled my arm back, and THREW A COOPER’S HAWK!! It was AMAZING!! The bird just took off without pause! I wish someone had taken a picture or a video of that, but my gosh it was incredible. I really hope we catch more raptors, because I have a strange addiction to throwing birds now.

Cooper's Hawk

 

It’s hard to top something like throwing a Cooper’s Hawk, but this might just do it – a couple weeks ago we were told that there is a competition among fall interns for the title of Lagunitas Intern. Apparently last fall, Point Blue contacted the Lagunitas Brewing Company about sponsoring an intern. I’m not sure why exactly they chose the brewery – perhaps because they are close to the Point Blue headquarters in Petaluma, CA, or perhaps because Point Blue staff drink a lot of Lagunitas beer, I don’t know. Anyways, they told the fall interns to write a 1-2 page essay on what the internship with Point Blue means to them and how it will help them achieve their career goals, and maybe the brewery would give them a free six-pack. Apparently only one person submitted an essay, and the others figured they would just let her have it since she really liked beer. Well, the brewery decided to do better than one free six-pack and ended up giving her a free case of beer every week for the next year! (I bet the other interns were pissed…) So, a couple weeks ago we were told about this competition, and a few days ago it was announced that I WON!! The beer aspect is definitely super awesome, but it’s also pretty cool that people thought I had the best essay about how this internship will benefit me. I’ve already learned a ton so far, and I expect to learn a lot more by the time this is over!

Red-shafted Flicker

One of the things that I’m definitely looking to improve are my field ID skills. I often take pictures (if I can) of birds that I see but don’t know because I don’t really know many North American birds (I think I actually know more birds of Peru than of North America!). However, that doesn’t always help, especially if I can’t get the picture. Fortunately, Point Blue has its 37^th Annual Rich Stallcup Bird-A-Thon happening at the beginning of October, where each team has 24 hours to identify as many species as possible by sight or sound (our team is made up of staff and interns at our field station). We are apparently taking the “green team challenge”, meaning that we aren’t using vehicles for the duration of our birding, other than to drive to our starting point. The permanent staff also like to make it more interesting since they do this every year, so we’ll apparently be dressing up in evening wear! I saw a picture from last year and the ladies were definitely wearing dresses and rubber boots. One guy was even dressed up in a full suit! Who says you can’t be fancy while birding? Anyways, I may not be the biggest help, but I’m using this as an opportunity to go birding with some of my expert coworkers and learn their tips for field identification. Overall, the Bird-A-Thon is one of Point Blue’s annual fundraisers for songbird research, the internship program, and wildlife conservation in general. So, if you feel like supporting wildlife research and conservation, feel free to donate to my website: http://pointblue.kintera.org/levins

You can also sponsor per species, in which case I would give you our total after October 6. Any amount is appreciated!

Anyways, this is turning out to be a fairly long post, so I’ll save some details about our off-sites and the surrounding area for next time! And maybe our capture highlights, too! I may even go back to my road trip from FL to CA - it was a great adventure.