Singing Sparrows

Southwest

A few more from Sweetwater Wetlands.

Shovelers coming in for a landing.


A rodent...any thoughts?


Southwest's Song Sparrow

Feeder Birds

I'm pretty much only seeing birds at the feeder...

Song


Purple


Tufted

Morphna

Yesterday I banded at Palo with Amanda, we caught a few birds, but the highlight was this song sparrow. Our usual subspecies of song sparrow is gouldii, but this one was a morphna.

Palo Clean

Today Michael and I headed to Muddy Hollow for a moderate day of banding!

Varied thrush (young male)


Varied thrush and song sparrow


Fox sparrow


Fox sparrow foot. They have massive claws for foraging in the dirt:

35

We had 35 birds on Friday at Pine Gulch, a very nice change from the normal slow days recently. Off the top of my head we had: yellow rumped warblers (audubon's and myrtle), white crowned sparrows, golden crowned sparrows, fox sparrows, song sparrows, a lincoln's sparrow, a wrentit, two robins, hermit thrushes, an anna's hummingbird, and probably others...



song sparrow


All of the warblers had lots of pollen surrounding their bills, bunching up their feathers

Joe's

Here are a few of Joe (Leibrecht)'s pictures

Potter

Today it was too windy to run the nets so instead we set up some potter traps (the traps I used to catch those chickadees in Duluth) around our site, using bird seed as bait. We ended up catching around 13 birds, which was pretty good, but checking them every 15 minutes got tiring. We got a wrentit, a couple spotted towhees, a nuttall's white crowned sparrow, a few golden crowned sparrows, a couple song sparrows, a few fox sparrows.

Here are some bad pictures!

Nets


white crowned sparrow


golden crowned sparrow


song sparrow


diana with a spotted towhee


spotted towhee

More babies

It's insane how fast birds develop, every time I see the difference between a day 1 or 2 baby and a day 8 one (which is when they are banded), I can only think about how much it must hurt to grow that fast.

Louise banding:

Day 8 WIFL:

Song sparrows:

Day two WIFLs:

Failed findings

I found two song sparrow nests today, but no WIFLs:


...and a dead soft-shelled turtle: