Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 362

Reporting again from the Crown Point Banding Station where it has been a wet cold week, I only saw the sun rise for two mornings. One of those was today Mother’s Day when many came to the station with their mothers to celebrate and we got some great birds. Most of the children got to release a bird while they were visiting. My sister Patti and her husband Ed Conroy came for a visit with their son Jeremy and three grandchildren. All the grandchildren got to release a bird. One was a recaptured female Rose breasted Grosbeak that we banded two years ago. We have banded 398 new birds at the station so far and I don’t have the exact number of different species; many it is only one bird of a species. The Blue Jays are leading in numbers caught which they have held from day one and they just keep flying in from the south. We have many recaptures from previous years, many from two years ago, a couple from four years ago and one from six years ago, a Common Grackle.

I don’t know the exact number of different species we have caught in the fifty-one years the station has been operating but it is getting up there. The last new bird that we had banded a few years back now was a Yellow Breasted Chat that strayed a little further north than they normally do and we put a band on it. We never heard anything about that bird after we released it but that happens with many of the birds we band. Many of the birds that live on the site are the ones that we recapture.

This morning, we had some excitement as Glen Chapman, who has been helping us check nets, and band some birds as a trainee, came back to the banding table after chasing a bigger brown bird down one of the nets and catching it. He says I have a Black Billed Cuckoo which had been seen and heard at the site a few times but never caught. Now we had one in a bag and Master Bander Gordon Howard got to take it out and reveal it to everyone. Sure, enough it was just what Glen thought it was and a new bird for the station. Lots of camera clicking went on as the bird was processed. A band was placed on the bird, and two tail feathers were taken for the special study, which I will talk about another time. Wing was measured indicating that this bird was a female and the tail feathers indicated it was a second-year bird. It did make some neat sounds as it was held but we never heard the cuckoo sound it makes in the wild. To get a new bird is special and to have so many regular visitors and helpers be there was great. The bird was released and it flew off into the bushes, and it may never be seen again.

We had only seen one Ruby throat Hummingbird at the station and that one was checking out a red shirt that a lady was wearing. The red columbine that grows all around the site is just coming into bloom which is a great plant for the hummers to feed on.

We lost a bird during this week as an injured Osprey was reported down by the lake shore. Ted Hicks went down to check it out after I called Nina Schoch about the bird. It was sitting by the shore with a badly broken right wing, like it may have hit a powerline. I put the bird in a bin and met Nina at the Westport Boat Launch. I was too severely injured to be repaired, and the bird was put down.

A little more excitement came earlier in the week when a visitor came in with a camera on a tripod and said I just saw a bobcat coming out of the bushes between two of our net lanes but didn’t have time for a photo. He said I never have gotten a photo of a bobcat and he still doesn’t. Later in the day while I was looking down at the main net lane, I saw the bobcat cross and duck under the nets to get to the other side of the lane. So that was a new mammal that we hadn’t ever seen at the site.

One more report from Crown Point as we close by noon on Saturday but that’s another story. See ya.

Photo above: Hummer at Stillwater by Marian Romano