Banding Purple Martins

I haven't posted in a while as it has been a busy start to the summer around here but I did have the chance to get out and do some banding the last three days which is kinda fun. I have a couple of friends who have Purple Martin, Progne subis, colonies and we have been banding young birds there for several years.


Late June and early July are prime banding times in this part of the country so starting on Wednesday I have been banding birds along with my friend Mark. The adults are pretty tolerant as long as we're not too close to the houses. The adults come back right away to feed young after we're done with a house. You can see the main food right now is dragonflies.

Purple Martin Colony from Roger Everhart on Vimeo.

I have a bit of video showing activity around the colony while we are there. The weather has been really good the whole time we've banded so the young birds don't get stressed.

This is one of the older young that we banded. This bird is probably 21 days old or so. Some are pretty close to fledging. This is the first year of a coordinated effort to color mark birds in order to determine state of origin when found on the wintering grounds.


Starting this year, young martins are being banded with colored bands on their left leg and USFWS bands on their right leg. In Minnesota, all birds will receive a red band with white numbers. The 3 numbers on the red band correspond to the last three numbers on the federal band. We're hoping we will be able to see and read band numbers from a distance. The hope is also to put a couple of radio transmitters on birds from this colony in order to see where they go as they stage in large flocks before starting their southward migration.


So far I have banded 95 birds and Mark has done an additional 103 young. We will go back to these colonies to finish up on birds that weren't ready to be banded yet and we are going to try to band some young at a couple of new colonies where we have spoken to the owners. By mid-July we'll be done and then it will be wait and see as far as return information. We hope that next spring we'll see lots of birds with red bands and maybe even a couple with a different color. Wouldn't that be something?!

More Conservation News

I had a quiet Father's Day in Cedar Falls so I headed out to take some photos at a Nature Conservancy Preserve. Came back to the dorm and while surfing the web came across some interesting articles. Hope you enjoy the updates!

More birds receive protection

Funding to help migratory birds

Wading birds in Europe have tough time

Bird Flight Evolution

I'm still down in Cedar Falls, Iowa at an NSF Institute working on the topic of wind energy and it's impact on the environment but I have been trying to keep up on news and events.

The study of the evolution of bird flight is really interesting and new discoveries seem to pop up all the time.

A new study is reported in the latest issue of Live Science that looks at molt in a large fossil species. Apparently there is an interesting relationship between feather molt and maximum body size in birds.

Baby Eastern Bluebirds

I had an exciting morning with my oldest son and my daughter when we went to band some baby Eastern Bluebirds, Sialia sialis, that had hatched in a Peterson Bluebird house just behind my school. I estimated their age at 8 days which is about as early as we can band them. Until that age their legs are actually too big because of the fat stored along the leg. You can see from the pictures that they still have a little bit of leg fat present.


We found 4 healthy young and got bands on all of them. Mom and dad bluebird didn't raise too much of a ruckus and we were in and out in about 15 minutes. My son got some video of the process that I may try to post later.

If all goes well, it won't be too long before all the birds are out of the nest and hanging out like the birds in the pictures below.



The Eastern Bluebird is truly one of the great success stories of a species recovery due to human assistance.

Summer- When Aging Birds Gets Harder

When Peter Pyle published the Identification Guide to North American Birds, he forever changed the way banders look at the birds they handle. Now, instead of "ring and fling" banders find themselves looking at much more detail in order to determine age, sex and sometimes subspecies of birds they net. One of the things that banders have had to really learn are the feathers and molt patterns of birds wings. This is often key to figuring out the age of a bird.


This Black-capped Chickadee shows one of those characteristics we sometimes see - retained, older feathers that contrast distinctly with newer feathers. These brown feathers on the birds wrist help age this bird as a second year bird.


Sometimes just one feather gets replaced and contrasts with the others as in the greater coverts of this Indigo Bunting. The one blue feather in the row of coverts is the clue to see here.


Many times the clue we're looking for is much more subtle and sometimes even misleading. In the wing of this Brown Thrasher there is a contrast in the color of the tips of the greater coverts. The 2 outer coverts next to the primary coverts contrast with the rest of the greater coverts by being paler and not as white as the coverts nearer the body. This contrast would suggest a "molt limit", or difference in age of feathers, however, there is such a thing as a "pseudolimit" where there is a natural contrast in the colors of feathers not related to age. This can make some birds impossible to age. Knowing what to look for means looking at lots of birds over the years.

While this can slow down the processing of birds at a banding table, the information gained could give us a much more intimate understanding of the life histories of many of the bird we band.

Science answers question about crash

When US Airways Flight 1549 went down in the Hudson River, the culprit responsible for bringing the craft down were thought to be Canada Geese. Airports around the country have to deal with birds on runways but the question is whether the geese in this instance were resident birds or migrants. A report released today in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment shows the geese involved in the crash were, in fact, migrant birds. The technique used to determine this is pretty cool.

Late migrants still moving

Tonight's Nexrad radar shows what appears to be migrant movement ahead of a low that is bringing storms into the upper midwest. Notice especially the southern tip of Lake Michigan. It looks like migrants are moving up both sides of the lake.

There have been reports recently in Minnesota and Wisconsin of unusually late season appearances of migrants such as Tennessee Warblers and Harris' Sparrows. This has been a spring migration that has kept many of us scratching our heads trying to figure out what is going on.

It may be worthwhile continuing to watch the radar for the next week or so. Traditionally, spring migration is done in mid-June and the southward movement of some birds can begin as early as mid-July. More reason to keep getting into the field.