September Migrants Return

Fronts to the North and South have birds pretty well stuck where they are for now. That meant we would have to see what we could manage with what got here in the past couple weeks since we had to miss last week. Turned out that certain species are right on time based on our records.

Case in point, we captured our first Veery of the season today. Last year we only captured one Veery but it was at the same time of year. Hope we can get more of them this year.



Can't believe there are still Cardinals around that we haven't banded! Today we caught a young male to add to the list.



The other species that arrived right on time was the Common Yellowthroat. They made up the majority of our captured birds.



We only caught 2 adult Yellowthroats. All the rest were male and female hatch-year birds.



Another week and another Ovenbird was banded.



The second most caught species today were White-eyed Vireos. Like the Common Yellowthroats, the majority of these were also hatch-year birds. You can tell most juvenile White-eyed Vireos by their dark eyes.



Then compare that to the one adult we caught that shows the much brighter eye.



Bird-of-the-Day actually belongs to this little bird. A Painted Bunting! Typically, we begin seeing buntings in October so this was a fun surprise.



Better still, it turned out to be a recently fledged bird. That means it was born somewhere close to where we caught it! Breeding Painted Buntings at Lake Lotus. Sweet!!



It is going to take something extra-special to beat that next week. I think we are up for the challenge.

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Next (planned) Banding Day: Sunday, September 23th.
All nets will be opened by 6:45 A.M.