Oct 8 2021
By Michelle Davis
The winds have not been in our favor for the past week, and we are still crawling towards the 1,000th capture of the season. However, we are collecting some good data on recaptured birds: birds banded earlier this season that are remaining onsite to replenish their fat reserves while waiting for a good time to depart. Our favorite recent recapture is this adult male Hooded Warbler, originally banded on Sept 25 weighing 10.7 g. He was recaptured on Oct 1 and had added quite a bit of fat, weighing in at 12.3 g or so. We heard him chinking in the same area between several nets for a couple of more days, so he had a good stopover at Cape Florida for at least a week.
This morning started off humid again; a little unwelcome after the drier air that moved in during the last week of September. The easterly winds had relaxed overnight and it was calm at sunrise, with more flight calls in the air than we had heard earlier in the week. Still, our nets were empty until a few birds trickled in here and there throughout the morning, including the first Alder Flycatcher we had banded in over a week. Around 1150 a flock of Swainson’s Thrush flew in, calling to each other with their flight calls that I am used to hearing high overhead at night. They seemed to disappear in the woods once they landed, but then another special bird that wasn’t around earlier in the day appeared about 30 minutes later.
This was a young male Blackburnian Warbler, a species that we have only banded once since 2011 (in 2015). He was foraging very low in some small privet shrubs immediately around the banding tent, and taunted us by flying through the banding tent under the canopy and just over our heads not once but twice. We were in the process of closing up the nets for the afternoon and had caught a small flock after a Cooper’s Hawk had chased them down out of the canopy of a ficus directly over a net. This flock included a Red-bellied woodpecker; a resident species that is usually too savvy to get caught.
When we went to close the last couple of nets after banding the flock, the barnstorming smart-aleck Blackburnian Warbler was waiting for us. A very nice end to the day!
Blackburnian Warbler by Michelle Davis
Blackburnian Warbler by Michelle Davis
Hooded Warbler by Miriam Avello
Another long-winged strong flying warbler who turned up this week is this Blackpoll (photo by Miriam Avello)
