San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory - Notes from the Station

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Common Yellowthroat

5/19/2022

Species: Common Yellowthroat
Most recent capture date: 5/08/2022
Earliest capture date: 5/31/2018
Age: at least six years old
Sex: female

Notes: The oldest documented Common Yellowthroat was 11 years, so she has a while to go if she wants to break the record, but six is still impressive! This venerable warbler had a full brood patch, indicating that she is either incubating eggs or brooding young chicks.

Sharp-shinned Hawk

5/16/2022

Species: Sharp-shinned Hawk
Most recent capture date: 4/17/2022
Age: about one year old
Sex: male

Brown-headed Cowbird

5/13/2022

Species: Brown-headed Cowbird
Most recent capture date: 4/23/2022
Earliest capture date: 5/01/2019
Age: at least four years old
Sex: female

Notes: Instead of building a nest and raising her own chicks, a female Brown-headed Cowbird lays eggs in other bird's nests for them to raise. This involves searching for other birds' nests and monitoring them to know when to add her egg, sneaking in at the exact right moment to go unnoticed, and (because success rates are low) laying 20+ eggs per season. Whew! I think raising your own chicks might be easier... (It's thought that cowbirds developed this strategy because they followed herds of bison as they roamed, eating bugs off of them, so the birds couldn't stay in one place long enough to raise their own chicks.)

California Quail

5/11/2022

Species: California Quail
Most recent capture date: 4/17/2022
Age: more than one year old
Sex: male

Notes: A common bird in the area, but not a common one in our nets! Quail usually stay too low to the ground to be captured. The colors and patterns on this bird were amazing to see up close.

Bewick's Wren

4/30/2022

Species: Bewick's Wren
Most recent capture date: 4/03/2022
Age: 7-9 days old

Notes: We have a few nestboxes at the banding station, and this year a pair of Bewick's Wrens took advantage of one. We disturbed them just long enough to put a band on this chick and their one sibling (there were also three unhatched eggs in the nest, an unusually high proportion of failed eggs), then popped them back in the nestbox to continue to be cared for by their parents. We hope we'll see them again in the nets one day! (Don't miss this chick's big fuzzy eyebrow tufts, a classic feature of baby songbirds.)

Common Yellowthroat

4/27/2022

Species: Common Yellowthroat
Most recent capture date: 4/02/2022
Earliest capture date: 4/09/2021
Age: more than one year old
Sex: male

Mallard

4/24/2022

Species: Mallard
Most recent capture date: 4/02/2022
Age: more than one year old
Sex: female

Notes: This was quite the surprise! Ducks do like to hang out at the banding station, but they are usually too big to end up in our nets. In fact, we believe this is the first time a Mallard has been caught in one of our nets! We can't band ducks - the permits for banding game birds are different from those for other birds - so we just took some data on her plumage and sent her on her indignant way. The size of the iridescent blue patch on her wing told us that she was hatched earlier than 2021.

Common Yellowthroat

4/21/2022

Species: Common Yellowthroat
Most recent capture date: 4/02/2022
Earliest capture date: 4/09/2021
Age: more than one year old
Sex: female

Notes: Common Yellowthroats like to live in marsh habitats like the one you can see behind this bird.

Song Sparrow

4/18/2022

Species: Song Sparrow
Most recent capture date: 4/02/2022
Age: at least ten months
Sex: male

Notes: This bird had a severe, but old and healed, wound at the back of his head. It looked like a large patch of skin had been removed all the way down to the skull, and although it had all healed over, there was still a sort of pothole in his head and no feathers growing there. Despite that, he was feisty and energetic, behaviorally no different from any other Song Sparrow. We were very impressed that he survived such an injury!

Wilson's Warbler

4/15/2022

Species: Wilson's Warbler
Most recent capture date: 4/02/2022
Earliest capture date: 4/09/2021
Age: More than one year old
Sex: male

About

You never know who you'll catch when you're bird banding! We wanted to share that sense of surprise, so we'll be posting here some of the birds we catch in the course of our research. Some birds will be here because they are unusual in some way; others just because they took a nice photo.

Authors

We are biologists who study landbirds in the south San Francisco Bay Area through bird banding at Coyote Creek Field Station. We have extensive training (and official permits) for our bird handling, and we prioritize bird safety over all else.

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