minus 27 and we want to band evening grosbeaks and snow buntings

male evening grosbeak

As the world best procrastinator  it has seemed to take me forever to sit down and get this blog going again  but I will get to my procrastination issue later! Today it is minus 27 Celsius and Monday  the forecast for today was fine  and we were looking forward to banding  but mother nature had other plans for us. This has afforded me a moment to get the blog going again.

Volunteer Ethan Quinton with a male and female evening grosbeak

         Winter banding has been wonderful as we have been enjoying  a very mild winter in north eastern Ontario with very few days that it has been too cold to band .  We have discovered that we cannot band snow buntings under minus 18 and  we cannot use mist nets under -15 as fingers just stop working below that. Taking chickadees out of nets  when you cannot feel you fingers is just impossible.
      Our  snow bunting banding has been a very slow process this year as it has been difficult to get a large enough flock on corn to band.

snow bunting banding Brie and Melissa

When the flock is too small they seem to be extra skittish and will not linger near food long enough to venture into the traps. Recently  the flock has grown to over  100 birds and we were able to catch 70 birds in 2 days of banding  and more importantly captured three birds that were banded  last year.

Kerns public school super scribe Lily McBride  witness to a returning bird from last year

 I always marvel that birds that can find food anywhere they wish will come back to the same field to feed. We are still waiting to catch our first "foreign" bird  and hopefully that will happen soon. The kids from kerns Public school have been super helpful in helping out with the research and one of the kids Lily was scribing last year and the other day when we caught one of the birds from last year. How cool is that !!!

Emma Buck banded the bird that returned from last year

     Now lets talk about evening grosbeaks a  bird that I have always been excited about, but now my interest has been taken to a new level and I cannot find enough material to read about them. At the marsh our record number of evening grosbeaks banded in a year was 37  and so far this year we have banded close to 130. This has all happened with the use of three mist nets  often just 2  and all these birds have been banded at the marsh.. In one miraculous net check we had 28 birds. For those who have seen evening grosbeaks at their feeders crack open sunflower seeds they may have an idea that those bills require a lot of respect. In banding circles there is a debate on which bird hurts the most when they can grab you with their bills. The 2 top candidates  are cardinals and evening grosbeaks but not having banded too many cardinals I  give the nod to evening grosbeaks with their vise like

 choppers

ouch!!!!

     There is a little bit of irony associated with our big grosbeak year in that federally the evening grosbeak has recently been listed as a species of concern which really means that it is on biologists radar. The species has fallen by 86% between 1970-2014. so you can imagine  that people are a bit concerned . They are know to be irruptive meaning that their population will spike from year to year  but this year at least in our area  the evening grosbeaks seem to be very localized  and we seem to be lucky to have them at the marsh. I know of a few people with feeders that have between 30 and 40 birds in a flock but I know of way more people who have been keeping sunflowers seeds filled to the brim  in their feeders and have not had any evening grosbeaks. I count my home feeder on that list.

Joanne feeling a big bite!! Feel her pain!

     I am going to end here but hope to revisit the evening grosbeak story with some statistics of  birds banded in Ontario. I think it will be a blog that  evening grosbeak lovers will enjoy but may be a bit heavy in stats which may not be for the folks that follow this blog and just look at the photo's which a very good friend confided in me that most people do which I am totally fine with.
Hopefully you are enjoying evening grosbeaks at a feeder near you and if you are I would love to hear about it.  Hoping to be back at the marsh soon so excited about banding in February. can you believe that some people don't like February!!!

Hilliardton marsh banding crew Ron Judd, Joanne , Mark Milton, and Ethan Quinton.