Healed

Mornings like this are always encouraging when it comes to the subject of bird injuries. Occasionally birds can get injured during the banding process, sometimes resulting in something like a broken leg. While this is very rare, it is something we think about a lot, doing everything we can to prevent. In the case of a broken leg we treat the injury to the best of our abilities and release the bird back into the wild. It may seem far fetched to assume a one legged bird can survive in the wild, but it does happen and we have recaptured birds with fully healed legs that had once been broken while banding or in the wild.

Today, our first bird was a hermit thrush (second of the summer!). Though it had never been banded before, you can tell in the picture below that this bird's right leg had once been broken, but was is now completely healed, and strong as ever (well, almost). I did however band it on it's left leg, as the crook in it's right may have caused some complications with the band moving freely.


Just now we caught his purple finch! This is a fully healed injury where the bird is missing all of it's leg below it's tarsal joint (essentially below the knee). Not only was this bird doing fine, but it had a brood patch, indicating that it was a breeding female.

Female goldfinch


This birds leg appears to have been previously broken, and despite somewhat of an angle, it has healed, and is sturdy as ever.

Lovely Lagunitas

Good day banding at Lagunitas Creek. We caught over 20 birds, including a very stunning pair of Lazuli buntings.

Male


Female


We also had around 5 robins, a couple of which were juveniles like this one


As well as a deformed swainson's thrush


And some feather lice

Surf Scoter

I woke up from a nap today only to hear from Renee that she had just come upon a SURF SCOTER in the visitors bathroom! Someone must have found it on the beach, and it is sick or injured, so they brought it up here. Unfortunately they did not bother to knock on our door, and just left it in the bathroom for us to find...people are very weird. She left early and brought it to a wildlife rehab center.

Split mandible

This fox sparrow had a split lower mandible, with this big hole going into its mouth...

Broken Iris

NYE2K!)

Went to Muddy Hollow with Lisa today for banding. We had a big day, with 37 total birds, 8 species. One of the net runs left us with 17 birds in one net, 16 of which were Myrtle's yellow-rumped warblers. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but they are big, hearty warblers, so none of them got stressed. The unfortunately thing was that my supervisor was not there. While I feel like I now have a better idea of the differences I can see between 16 MYWA's, I am still unsure of what specific features help me distinguish a hatch year male from an after half year female. I did see two birds that seemed to clearly be after hatch year males, but the rest were recorded as unknown unknown... There are so many details for each species and until you are taught what's actually important, as opposed to what the guide tells us, it is hard to feel confident about many grey areas of ageing and sexing.

Here are the bags with birds in them, waiting to be banded after our flock of warblers hit.


The backside of what looked to certainly be an AHY male (looking at the size of the black centers of the feathers between the yellow rump and tail..


AMRO


Hermit thrush with some weird growth defect.

NOSH 2

I caught our second Northern Shrike today...and it torn me to pieces. All blood you see is mine.

Freak

This saw whet was missing three out of four talons on one of it's feetsies

yuck

Stitched

The docs said yes, so I got 3 stitches...

Split chin, check it daddio.

Let's vote on if I need stitches...I say nay.

zombieduck

Antz

Poor guy

A dove I found just sitting on the ground, injured somehow. It was not doing so hot: