#800

Blog post number 800 here.

Our first of two hatch year female Sharp-shinned Hawks from yesterday before release.

Diurnal for a day

The last couple of days have brought much colder weather and high winds, giving me two nights off and a chance to interact with the living. Or at least the diurnal birds. I got to see two HY male Goshawks caught withing two minutes of each other yesterday at Frank's blind.
A nice old male Sharp-shinned

And a Fox Sparrow caught in the raptor nets.

SY Sharpie

When I left the ridge the main blind caught a bunch of sharpies and some Merlin, not much flying. We did catch three sharpies at once though, all different ages (first, second, and after second year), giving a nice comparison of eye and feather color. Here's the second year with some very obvious retained juvenile flight and upperwing feathers:

13!?

Amazingly few songbirds were caught this morning (13), but an Eastern Phoebe was nice, and a new species captured on the ridge for the fall.


Lincoln Sparrows are not uncommon, but are still one of my favorite sparrows we catch. They're just so CLEAN looking compared to the many song sparrows I've handled.


It was a fairly slow day for hawks too, so Dave, Frank and I took time to do some preliminary Saw-whet net set up, as it looks like we will be testing their migration sometime this week! Despite the slowness Frank did pull down an adult female harrier, possible the first I've seen in hand.

Big first day

Whoa, big first day here in Duluth...50 birds at the main bling, including five species of hawk.

Cooper's Hawk


Red-tailed


Harrier


And a slow release

Mice

If you've read anything about this island recently it was probably about mice. There are a lot here, they eat what they can and get themselves eaten as well, mostly by the burrowing owls, the raven, and gulls, but also by there fellow mouse.

Today we had a sharp-shinned hawk running loose, killing any songbird in sight along with this mouse


Gulped down momentarily


Lots of mouse bones found in these owl's pellets

Old pic

From Joe:

Another shin

Our only bird of the day yesterday was this young male sharp shin. These were pictures from Joe.

SSHA

Second sharp shin of the season. Also a young male.

Nov 1?

I have about 18 days left here, insane. My next job will be working on the Point Reyes National Seashore, which is about an hour north of San Fran. It's an internship, so, again, very little money is involved, but the opportunities for learning are significant enough to make it worth it. It's essentially a songbird banding internship where I'll be learning in a lot more detail the standardized ways of aging, sexing, banding and measuring passerines. I'll also get a chance to do point counts and winter bird censuses, learning other techniques for mapping out local bird distributions. We're also going to get a chance to do independent research projects using the decades of data they have collected there. The idea, for me at least, is to develop somewhat of an understanding of the kinds of questions that are useful to ask given the specific data set. What questions are feasibly answered, what questions are not, what questions am I actually interested in? This may help with figuring out grad school interests. I'm excited for the winter in Cali, living closer to a few friends, but unfortunately a lot farther away from Massachusetts.


Photo by my pa

LE flying off

Comparison

I don't have much new to show, but I thought I'd put up a comparison post. A lot of these pictures are repeats but I separated them by genus and labeled them by age and sex if I knew it. We still haven't caught some varieties (like an adult male harrier) and I'm missing pictures of a few (like a female kestrel), but I thought this would give a good look at the hawks we have been catching, with side-by-side comparisons to show some differences.

Falcons:
Immature Merlin


Immature male kestrel




Immature peregrine





Accipiters:
Sharp-shinned
Two immature birds, female on the left, male on the right:


Two adults with different shades of the eyes:




Cooper's
Immature:


Adult:


Northern goshawk
Immature



Buteos
Broad-winged
Immature:


Red-tailed
Immature:
These are three different birds






Circus:
Northern harrier
Immature


Adult female

Larbear

The winds have been stellar, the birds have been flying, but the luck isn't there. We've seen around 80 redtails in the last two days and have only managed to pull in one for good. At one point today we had two perched around the blind, and two others circling overhead. Despite repeated stoops and a very near miss (due to a malfunctioning bownet) we have had little success.

RT


Adult male shin with a little bit of eye discoloration in the left corner


SURPRISE!


Feeding the swet

Owlets

It's around 70 here right now, which would be great normally, but the birds do not feel the urgency to fly south with the temperatures so high, which has resulted in a grand total of ZERO birds caught today, and only eight owls last night. But have no fear visitors, one owl is guaranteed...I hope.

View from the overlook

Photo by my pa


Photo by my pa

Me and me ma

Photo by my pa

Adult shin

Photo by my pa