Wednesday 25 April 2012

Blast From The Past...1989 In Fact

I don't know about you but I enjoy going through my old notebooks and I have them all from when I started birding in 1976! Over lunch today I picked up my notebook that covered part of 1989 and on 25th April 1989 I was at the Breakwater Field Station, with Phil, at Long Point Bird Observatory on Lake Erie in Ontario, Canada. According to my notes we had quite a fall that morning and ringed a good few birds.

Out on the lake we had 500 Red-breasted Mergansers, 6 White-winged Scoters, Common Loon and 2 Horned Grebes. The marshes and pools held 2 Kildeers, 2 Great Blue Herons, 30 Forsters Terns, American Bittern, Northern Harrier, Greater Yellow Legs, 3 Boneaparte's Gulls and 50 Ring-billed Gulls.

However it really was the fall of passerines that stands out in my memory and the totals that follow have the number we ringed in brackets; Northern Flicker - 300 (4), Mourning Dove - 20, Eastern Meadowlark - 5, Chipping Sparrow - 200 (21), Tree Swallow - 30, Brown Creeper - 500 (70), Golden-crowned Kinglet - 4,000 (we couldn't ring any because Long Point BO at the time didn't carry a ring size small enough, but we still had to extract over 300 from mist nets!), Ruby-crowned Kinglet - 1,200 (51), Hermit Thrush - 30 (9), Brown Thrasher - 10 (3), Field Sparrow - 100 (19), Song Sparrow - 50 (10), Swamp Sparrow - 20 (5), White-throated Sparrow - 100 (30) and Dark-eyed Junco - 1,000 (83).

Sorry to bore you (I jmust be bored because I couldn't get out this morning), but happy days!

Northern (Yellow-shafted) Flicker

2 comments:

Peter Fearon said...

Those are the days that the carolinian belt of Canada every once in a while obliges, when they come, they are amazing. I remember one fall where I ringed 265 warblers in one morning of 15 different species! Outstanding!

Strange that they didn't authorise the use of OA's on GCKI's as well as RCKI's!

The Hairy Birder said...

It was strange Peter and very frustrating. As I say we must have extracted over 300 GCKIs! In fact they were bouncing off the cabin windows, coming into the cabin and even finding their way into furled nets! 265 warblers of 15 differnet species is nice, very nice!