The 3 C's of Bird Banding

We often tell visitors to our banding programs that some days we catch a lot of birds and other days we sit and drink a lot of coffee waiting for a bird to appear. The conditions that we think are the best for having a good banding day are what we call the 3 C's. That stands for cloudy, cool and calm. This morning we had all of those conditions and lots of migrants in the area. It turned out to be a really busy and fun banding day.

The totals for this morning were 33 birds of 15 species. Some were the local residents such as the 10 Black-capped Chickadees we caught. Others were birds moving through or summer residents just arriving. Below is a list of species we banded today:

Yellow Warbler
Canada Warbler
Blue-winged Warbler
Magnolia Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
Mourning Warbler
Clay-colored Sparrow
Black-capped Chickadee
Warbling Vireo
White breasted Nuthatch
Downy Woodpecker
Gray Catbird
Northern Cardinal
Red-winged Blackbird
Black-billed Cuckoo

We had nice looks at a couple of warblers that we don't always get time to study in the hand.

 This female Magnolia Warbler was the only one of the day but we have seen them moving through our area for a while now.

Plumage indicated that this is a second year bird (hatched last summer).

Blue-winged Warblers nest in this part of the state and while we were extracting this bird from the net there were a couple of others sitting high in the trees calling.

The bird of the day had to be this Black-billed Cuckoo. This is only the second cuckoo that we've ever had the chance to put a band on. It was immediately exciting when we walked up to our net and all we could see was a long tail sticking straight up.

The red bare skin around the eye makes this an adult bird and even though this bird had a brood patch, we couldn't sex it because both male and females in this species develop brood patches.

Another thing we had not seen was the coloration of the underside of the wing. Pretty cool bird to have in the hand and worthy of a celebratory beer at lunch after the banding session.

We have another program tomorrow, Sunday, at a different site but if today is any indication of what birds are around I'm hoping that I wake up to cloudy cool and calm conditions once again.