May 31st, 2006 - End of spring migration monitoring at Ruthven

HOwdy:
This marked the last day of Spring migration monitoring at Ruthven Park. Now we realize that birds will continue to trickle through for the next 2 weeks or so but.....we have other things to do. As it stands we had a VERY successful Spring season setting a new record for the most birds banded : 1,482. The previous record was 1,407.

We will now switch to our "summer" banding protocol - MAPS banding is done once in every 10-day period starting in June. If you are interested, contact Brian Pomfret (bpomfret(at)bfree.on.ca) to see when he is going to do it. Then, toward the middle of July we start to band whenever we get the chance in order to capture and mark the newly fledging young. If you are interested in this, you contact Rick Ludkin (rludkin(at)hotmail.com) to find out when it will be going on. We use different nets for the two different banding regimes so as not to confuse the data collection.

I would like to thank everyone that helped out and Jeff MacLeod for creating the HBO blog that everyone seemed to find so entertaining.

Rick

Ruthven

A retrapped Common Yellowthroat prevented me from being skunked on my first net round (usually the biggest round) this morning. The heat has brought the spring migration at Ruthven to an end. The number of species on census is way down from a week ago. Most of the birds I handled today were clearly breeding locally.

Banded today (3): GCFL, NOCA, SOSP.

Retrapped (8): PHVI, COYE, BWWA, YWAR, SOSP.

Loretta

Selkirk

A decent assortment on first run this morning but then it died. Slim pickings for the rest of the morning.

Banded: TRFL 1, GCTH 1, GRCA 3, CEDW 1, MAWA 1, COYE 1, LISP 2 = 10

T-39 and counting.

May was a productive month with 1192 birds banded.

Selkirk will be closed June 1st, but will be open on the 2nd for about 10 more days. It definitely will close June 15 for the spring season, if not before.

John