1000th bird banded

We don’t capture the same volume of birds at CFBS when compared to many other banding stations, so it has taken until today for us to capture our 1,000th bird of the season, a Red-eyed vireo. Our nets are located inside a hardwood hammock so we don’t catch migrating birds until they have settled into the woods and formed foraging flocks. Two of our nets are in more open habitat adjacent to the hammock, and these sometimes fill up with birds as they drop down out of the sky right after sunrise. What we lack in quantity we make up for with quality!

Martina, Robin, Mario and Nico with Bird # 1,000.

The Adopt-a-Net fundraiser was very successful and we thank all of our donors! Everyone enjoys their weekly reports from Robin with photo highlights of the best birds their nets captured. We were able to use the funds to purchase a new scale, a new banding tent, and several new nets. An extra thanks to Sandy Milledge, Brother Milledge and Celeste de Palma at Tropical Audubon Society for their help in making Adopt-a-Net work smoothly.

Liz and Celeste replacing worn-out Net 3 with a brand new net.

The Black-throated blue warblers are starting to increase in number as we get into October. They are usually our top species overall, and we band between 200 to 580 a season. Black-throated blues have the strongest sexual dimorphism of all of the warblers, and as a consequence they were once thought to be separate species.

This bird is an adult female with an unusual plumage, particularly on the head. She has extensive blackish and bluish coloration, suggestive of a male.

The left bird is our unusual female, the right bird is a more typical female.

More views of these two birds. The light supercilium and eye crescent are completely absent on the left bird, and she has deeper bluish tones and a larger ‘handkerchief’ wing patch.