Each half hour, employees and volunteers at Oak Hammock Marsh examine on the dozen nets scattered across the web site.
“We’re fishing for birds,” mentioned the marsh’s Resident Naturalist Paula Grieef with a chuckle. “It’s referred to as mist netting for birds.”
The netting is ok sufficient to lure small songbirds, like sparrows, robins, and warblers. Workers gently untangle the birds and place them in a material bag earlier than they weighed, measured, and given a small metallic “bracelet” – a chook band, clamped across the chook’s leg and inscribed with an identification quantity.
“We’re placing a little bit metallic band on it to realize as a lot details about the chook as we are able to… to know the place they go, how they use Oak Hammock Marsh, the place are they coming from, how wholesome is the inhabitants,” Grieef mentioned.
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The bands are issued to the Canadian Wildlife Service by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They’re then distributed to banding stations just like the one at Oak Hammock Marsh. Oak Hammock Marsh’s station is the one to band and observe songbirds within the province, however the knowledge collected goes into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service database.
The marsh’s chook banding season lasts from July 15 to the top of September, and the “banders” will encounter roughly 100 species of songbirds in that point.
“Usually in a single season for fall banding, we’ll do round 2,500 birds,” mentioned Kelsey Bell, who heads the marsh’s banding station. “This 12 months, we’ve got caught over 3,000 and banded them.
Whereas the rise in numbers appears promising on paper, Bell says it’s primarily because of some species having a surplus of meals this 12 months. The station noticed an enormous bounce within the variety of Tennessee warblers – small birds with yellow and white feathers – over final 12 months. However Bell says that’s as a result of they feed on spruce budworms, a kind of moth that additionally noticed a inhabitants increase this 12 months.
“Songbirds usually are declining throughout Canada and North America,” she mentioned.
Whereas avian flu is a menace to a few of the different birds that frequent the marsh, like geese and geese, Bell says most songbirds don’t carry the illness. The primary contributors to the general inhabitants decline are habitat and meals supply loss.
Guests to Oak Hammock Marsh on Sunday had the prospect to look at employees lure and band birds. Jimm Simon of Stonewall has been coming to Oak Hammock Marsh for over 30 years and calls himself an “beginner chook watcher.”
“We realized a lot about chook banding,” he mentioned. “It’s fascinating to see that stuff.”
Oak Hammock Marsh’s fall banding season ends for the 12 months Oct. 1.
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