Morning to morning, bird to bird

Every morning from the banding site where we work, I watch late coming cars winding their way up to the peak of Cadillac Mountain to watch the sunrise, headlights glinting in the shadows. That sunrise is slowly becoming a genuinely pleasant experience, rather than merely a bafflingly beautiful reminder of hours of potential sleep sacrificed. As September mornings grow colder, its rising glow means growing warmth, happily anticipated. 

 

A Cedar Waxwing, in the process of being banded.

And so it goes, chill mornings turning to warm, even hot days, and back to cool nights. The order of the day this fall is catching and banding birds, passerines and their near relatives, mostly – songbirds. The catching is done with nets made of fine dark colored mesh called mist nets. Common in avian field research, mist nets are used for many reasons and in many ways to safely ensnare birds of all sizes (all quite alive) for closer inspection before release. For this project in Acadia, we are “passive netting,” which essentially means setting up semipermanent net lanes in areas of potentially high bird traffic, in hopes that birds passing through will pay us some inadvertent visits. Our targets: any bird unwise or unwary enough to blunder into our nets. 

Morning catch: a row of bird-bags, each holding a captured bird.

 

Our goals? Contrary to occasional lingering misapprehensions, nearly all modern banding efforts have serious, well defined research purposes; ours is, broadly speaking, to estimate which and how many of the songbirds and their near relatives travel south along the Gulf of Maine during autumn migration, and what paths they take and habitats they frequent when doing so. Thus, with nets in several habitat types ranging from open field to forest, and additional surveys in vegetative structure and available food within those areas to more precisely define their characteristics, we keep track of not only who is migrating through our site, but in what sort of habitat they are seen and caught. When all is said and done, the results should prove useful for many reasons, including planning for current and future land and coastal ocean management, and for tracking how a changing climate will affect these birds in seasons and years to come (hint: most probably in unfortunate ways).

For now, though, the days continue to cycle from golden morning to bright noontime, from bird to bird, bit by bit a picture building of a season and of the lives of a few of the living things with whom we share it. It's a work in progress and an interesting one, at that.