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Field Log
Field Log is a rotating column in our quarterly "Bay Bird Review" newsletter that provides Bird Observatory volunteers and staff the opportunity to share the connections with nature formed through their SFBBO experiences.
To Touch a Bird - Bird Banding at the Coyote Creek Field Station
We capture birds with pencils and paint brushes, or cameras and recorders, but most of us rarely touch a living bird. Bird banders do. When they hold a bird in the hand and spread its wing they are closer to the magic of flight than the rest of us. I wanted to watch banders and learn what they knew.
In order to get to the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory’s banding station before dawn we left my friend’s house at 4:40 a.m. An hour later, in the faint first light, I watched her and two other banders unroll finely-meshed nets attached to aluminum poles. When stretched into place the nets were eight-ten feet high and about three feet off the ground. One went across a field, one through an open wooded area, and one was near a stream. The shortest was about fifteen yards, the longest forty. A mockingbird imitated a fortissimo Bewick’s Wren as they worked and then, suddenly, it was morning.
The banders’ code of ethics states that their work must be “beyond reproach,” and that “banders are responsible for the safety and welfare of the birds they study.” These banders had to take fox precautions to meet these requirements because, if they did not remove a bird that was caught in a net soon enough, the bird might become an easy meal for one of the resident gray foxes.
One bander started on fox patrol. In order to minimize interference with the birds’ morning activities, the other two banders planned to return to the green mobile home that was their two-room field station. If the woman in the field found a bird in a net, she would use her walkie-talkie to tell the other two women where it was. Every half hour all the banders would check the nets. Before the two banders could leave, though, they had caught five birds.
My friend untangled a Song Sparrow, put it in a small cloth bag, and pulled the draw string shut so the bird could not escape. I accompanied her back to the field station, where she hung the bag on a wall hook next to the four other bags, which held two more Song Sparrows and two Lincoln Sparrows. The bags moved when the birds fluttered. Flight-magic class was about to begin.
The banders put on magnifying goggles. They each took a bird out of its bag. They held its head between their first and second fingers with their hand on the bird’s back. If the bird had been previously caught, the bander recorded the band number. A released bird is a doubly valuable source of information if it is re-captured.
If the bird had not been caught before, the bander selected a new band and tightened it around one of the bird’s legs with a pair of pliers. They blew on the bird’s head to see its skull, which might reveal the bird’s age. They turned the bird over and determined its sex, if possible. They stretched out the wing, measured the length of the primaries and secondaries, and recorded all this information on a data sheet while holding the bird. Then they put the bird in a tube and weighed it on a scale. Finally they took the bird outside and let it go.
Is to touch a bird to be touched by that bird? When my friend spread a Hermit Thrush’s wing and told me that the buffy tips on the primaries suggested a second year bird, her voice had a slight sparkle. Maybe banders have learned that when a banded bird flies, a part of the bander flies with it.
They banded and released twenty-one birds, mostly sparrows and thrushes, that morning. The wind came up at 9:40 a.m. To be “beyond reproach” the banders furled the nets. If a bird got caught in a blowing net, it could get so tangled that its safety and welfare would be compromised. I wished they could have banded longer. Flight was still magic to me.
Or maybe I have it backwards. Maybe the birds have captured the birders. If so, I am a model prisoner and have never tried to escape.
Someday an enterprising bander will market a line of bird-band necklaces and rings. Bird-band jewelry would signify a more lasting commitment than the bird hats and bird shirts that birders wear. If I wore a bird-band on my finger, I would feel closer to the magic of flight.
-- David Rice
David Rice has been birding up-and-down California for 35 years. He is an active county birder. He wishes he could fly.
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