Labor Day

The first monday of September is called Labor Day, an official federal holiday in the US. On Labor Day the social and economic contribution of workers is celebrated (thanks Wikipedia!). For us, the volunteers at Powdermill, monday also means our only day-off in the week. So this is the day when no banding takes place at Powdermill. Personally, I wouldn't call this a day-off of course, since every day of banding is in fact a day-off for me haha!

Nevertheless, the weather was, and still is, crappy. It started raining yesterday, in the late afternoon, and hasn't stopped since. So today we didn't watch any birds. 

Rain, rain, and........ rain! (Yesterday night)

We went to the Wal-Mart however, near Latrobe. Which was a useful waste of time. 

First thing I saw when grabbing a cart in the Wal-Mart was this:

I quote: ''Your child can fall out of cart and suffer a serious head injury''. Thanks Wal-Mart for letting us know that can happen to (fat) kids! (It is all about sueing each other here in the US so that's why).

I might get myself one of these, plenty of White-tailed Deer around!

Since today was kind of boring, without birds, I'll show you a couple of more pics from last week:

Northern Cardinal, after hatching-year female

American Redstart, hatching year male

Ovenbird

Moult with Gray Catbirds

This hatching year Gray Catbird has replaced Alula feather 1 but not A2, so note the slight difference in colour.

This hatching year Gray Catbird shows a clear moult limit in the greater coverts. This young bird has got a couple of new inner greater coverts , the rest is still old, as shown above.

It is still raining steadily but we hope that it won't rain tomorrow morning, but the predictions aren't really positive. We keep our fingers crossed!