Bigish day

Crazy day at Pine Gulch for us. After a fairly unsuccessful day yesterday we re-setup today, expecting worse weather than yesterday. It was looking that way, but after opening and closing the nets a couple of times, we were able to keep them running for close to enough hours. However, the wind picked up, and despite the clear sky we had to shut down early. That, however, does not mean that we didn't get any birds. On one net run we had 17 birds, which made things hectic as it started to rain, bird bags were low, and new interns are still working on skills like extraction (let alone doing it under semi-pressure). It all went well though, and ended up having a nice flow of birds for the next couple of hours, leaving us with a final of 25 birds and 7 species, which included: swamp sparrow, both subspecies of yellow rumped warblers, pine siskin, Anna's hummingbird, bushtit, common yellowthroat, and lincoln's sparrow.

Here is the swamp sparrow, a species we only catch a few times a year:


Female common yellowthroat


Male common yellowthroat


Cara and Renee processing the hummingbird




Female bushtit


Faded wingtips