That was what I thought today... It rained last night but it was dry when we started banding. The weather forecast said there would be a 20% chance of precipitation, well, we got the full load of it! Powdermill is situated along a ridge and today, a soft wind was blowing from the southwest. There was a line of showers (splashing showers!) visible on the radar, and with a bit of luck we would stay out, but we obviously didn't. The wind blew the showers against 'our' ridge so we got hit by every possible shower. We opened at 6.30 and already closed the nets by 7.40. I got completely soaked while I was closing the nets. I took a shower this morning, but that was completely unneccesary apparently. We reopened the nets a little later again, because it looked promising. Soon, we were proved wrong, and we got soaked again (well I didn't because I closed the nets with an umbrella this time!). During these showers a group of Solitary Sandpipers came down twice. The first group existed out of 7 birds and the second group existed out of 4 birds. It was sooo frustrating because they came down as we just had closed the 8c net, which is the big mesh net for catching waders. And guess what.. they flew around our closed nets, flew straight through 8c that just had been closed. If we would have had it open we would have caught 5 in one go. Later in the morning the rain had gone but it was not worth it to open up the nets again. For the rest of the morning we did some hanging around at the lab. After we had these encounters with the Sollies we reopened 8c but none were to be seen or caught again, more luck next time!
The results of ~1 hour of banding:
Acadian Flycatcher 1 -
Eastern Phoebe 1 -
Swainson's Thrush 5 -
Wood Thrush 2 -
Gray Catbird 4 -
Chestnut-sided Warbler 1 -
Magnolia Warbler 1 -
Common Yellowthroat 4 -
Swamp Sparrow 1 -
Indigo Bunting 1 -
Total 21, 10 species
The rest of the day the weather was fine. In the afternoon I took a long-lasting nap of 3 hours because last night I woke up at 3 and didn't go back to sleep since. In our front lawn I've seen a couple of Gray Squirrels the last couple of days and I noticed some interesting things they did. Yesterday I saw a Gray Squirrels burrowing some hickery nuts in our front lawn. This evening, I saw 2 Gray Squirrels digging up these hickery nuts again, a funny sight! I took a few pic's of them digging, searching for their burrowed nuts and finally, with a hickery nut stuck between their teeth.
Searching
Watching
Smelling
Digging
Chasing.. away another squirrel
Find the Turekeys! During heavy showers yesterday evening a group of 4 Turkeys passed by. I imitated their call but they didn't seem to be attracted.
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