Elusive Red-Bellied Woodpecker banded, but not without fight

I’m home from Crown Point Banding Station, and after two weeks of sleeping on a cot my bed felt like a dream last night.

The final tally isn’t done yet but we banded about 530 total birds of 60 different species.

We added four new species to the list of birds banded there over the 37 years:

A female Cerulean Warbler, a Rough Winged Swallow, a Red-bellied Wood-pecker and five Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.

This makes the total number of species banded at 106.

The hummers were banded by Ted Hicks, who has a special license to band these little birds.

We caught 22 Hummers but he was only there for five of them.

He has a special cylinder trap that he puts over the feeder that has a pull string to trip it.

We only caught one in the trap and the others in our regular nets. The bands for these birds are very tiny, as you can imagine.

He built a special pair of pliers to put on the bands. He takes a wing measurement—females have a longer wing than males.

He looks at the fat content of each bird and weighs each one by placing it in a short plastic tube. You have to look very closely at the leg to see a band.

We caught both the Rough-winged Swallow and the Red-bellied Woodpecker in a net we set out in the field between two big Thorn Apple trees.

We had heard and seen the Red-bellied several times and just missed catching it in the regular net lanes.About 7 p.m. Friday (5/18) a bird hit the field net. A Robin was upset not far away so I thought maybe we had caught its mate.

Then I saw a flash of bright red as I was going up toward the net, which is about three hundred feet from the banding table.

I knew at once it was the woodpecker. I ran the rest of the way as bigger birds can get out of the smaller mesh nets.

Once I had my hands on the bird I wasn’t going to let it get away no matter how much it pecked me with its beak or scratched me with its claws.

It was a beautiful male and I guess I celebrated about as much as any 68-year-old bird bander could.

We got a band on the bird and took several pictures in the fading sunlight.

This was definitely the highlight of the whole two weeks for me!

I went to town and we had marshmallows over the Barbie grill to celebrate. We were just like kids in a candy store.

We had over twenty retraps of birds we had banded in previous years.

One Baltimore Oriole was five and a half years old.

A Black-capped Chickadee was the oldest bird we caught and it was six and a half years old.

This bird lives on-site and has been caught every year but one since it was first caught.

It was a student bird of a visitor the first time it was caught, so now this person gets a card every year it’s recaptured to show that their bird has returned.

We had three school classes come to the station this year, one from Whitehall, one from Bolton, and some first through third graders from Keene.

The students who got to hold a bird now have student birds out there for another year.

There are a lot of other things going on in the world of nature around the banding station.

An Osprey nest can be seen at the end of our field, Leopard Frogs jump out of our way as we check nets, the mystery bird of Crown Point, Gray Tree Frogs are calling most of the day, Grass and Milk Snakes are seen in the field and you never know what kind of bird may be flying over the open field area.

This year we had four Bald Eagles fly by which got the Osprey up in attack mode.

We got to see the Eagles go into the upside down defense position several times, which was neat.

For the last five years we have found a Gray Tree Frog in one of the Bluebird houses that makes calls from inside.

Last year it attracted two mates. This year Tree Swallows have nested in the box but they don’t seem to be upset that the frog is there.

I did take it out through the roof of the box however, as the mom Swallow sat on her nest.

The Foxes have a litter of pups nearly every year, and this year it is no different.

I saw the litter of four playing in the road culverts by the bathroom one night.

The workmen mowing the fields for this weekend’s events found a dead one that was probably killed by Coyotes. The adult Foxes didn’t rob our nets this year so the mammals in the fields must have been plentiful.

Wow! It’s so green outside, but that’s another story. See ya.