Lexxy Fancypants

Day 5: I am now obliged to crochet little birds for the girls, in exchange for not having to knit underwear. I'm not really sure how this happened. XD Elanore requested an Indigo Bunting, and Alessia wants a Yellow-breasted Chat. I am to finish them by next Fall, and I plan to embroider their names on them as well. These girls are so sweet. In fact, I just realized that Elanore's mom works at my college! I may deliver them sooner than the Fall after all. :D

Quiet, quiet day, despite a good tailwind starting around midnight. The most exciting bird was a Yellow-breasted Chat, which is a very large warbler, and the most exciting event was when some sea kayakers stopped on the island and one of them somehow got past all the signs saying "PATH CLOSED FOR BIRD BANDING, KEEP OUT" and ended up in the net lane, a foot away from a netted bird, wondering where the cemetary was. Not. Cool. Stay the fuck out of our net lanes. You're putting unnecessary stress on the captured birds and scaring off the uncaptured ones.

I'm finding that I really, truly adore working with the general public. I like teaching them what we do and putting a bird in their hands for the first time. I'm pretty good at multitasking with recording data and explaining what we're doing. I really, really like it. I think I need to work on my ID of various wildlife and plants and see if I can get a job as a naturalist. At the very least, this volunteer work will be really fabulous on my resume.

Today is SO QUIET. We got some nuthatches and some yellowthroats and that's about it. Not even catbirds.


Day 6: If yesterday was quiet, today is SILENT. Luckily the day has gone by quite quickly. The morning was full of uncontrollable giggles, with Lauren keeping us company until she departed, along with all the students and faculty. It's just island staff and us, now. They're altering mealtimes and doing away with hot breakfasts altogether. Sorrow. I miss having eggs. OH THE IRONY??? Reportedly we get another bander tomorrow. Which is excellent, since the weather tonight will be absolutely perfect for a migratory flight. We should be inundated with birds.

Day 7: No birds. No bander. I am laughing so hard.

Day 8: David the bander arrived! He missed the boat yesterday due to shenanigans, but at least got some rest. I finally got the chance to go soak my feet in the ocean, and it helped a great deal. I also found a HUGE piece of smoky quartz that I may smuggle back home for my aquarium to go with the giant rose quartz. Naps were had. I burned the back of my leg and got a spider bite on my arm somehow. Ow.

Day 9: Lindsay leaves today. :C She's awesome and I'll miss her. I sat down to talk to her about how I'm doing, how I can improve, and got some excellent pointers. I am apparently right about in the middle of the intermediate skill level, which is fantastic for someone who only started extracting birds last Fall with no practice in between. I need to work on more severely tangled birds and tongued birds - the latter I had to hand off to Lindsay even when I could see how easy it would be, because we both forgot that there are little plastic picks in the banding box that I could use. Oops. Some VIPs are apparently on island - I tried putting on a nice shirt, but it's too damn hot. Tank top it is. Apparently late tonight the director's son will be here, who is a very tall young man who is the combative kind of special needs. His diagnosis is the same as my brother's, so it might not be that bad now that he's a bit older. We'll see, I suppose!

Pictures later, probably in a "day 10/11" post. Whew.

This day's been reasonably quiet. We had another flush of baby catbirds in the morning, but by mid-morning we had a few runs of 0 birds. Perfect time to actually explain what I'm doing.

I'm not a bander, but rather a band-aide. (Yes, yes, beautiful pun.) We set up the mist nets, a very fine mesh arrancged in long pockets. The bird flies into the net and falls into the pocket. They get a bit tangled (some more than others) so we carefully extract them. I had to learn several grips so I could hold them without hurting them, and the actual process of removing the bird from the net is pretty darn fiddly. I can't take pictures of it because PETA flips out even though the birds' safety is the absolute top priority. We check the nets for birds every 20 minutes unless conditions are such that it would stress or endanger the birds to be left that long, in which case we shorten the timing. Yes, we even band through meal times! When there's enough people we eat in shifts. The second shift gets shafted though, there's not often much food left at that point. The nets open at dawn and close at dusk. At this time of year, that means getting up at 5am and going to bed at 9pm. In the spring, the hours are much longer and the banders generally get 3-4 hours of sleep a night. As you can imagine, things get a bit crazy around here. I'm in the process of making a tail from gull feathers to shoo flies away from my ankles. That's just normal around here.

Anyway, Liz left around 3pm for a family emergency. It will just be Lindsay and I for several days, which makes mealtimes even trickier than usual, since I can't band. Dinner worked out well since we had a quiet evening with few birds. I called her back due to a dragonfly in the net, though. ( That story does not end well. ) In happier news, almost every time I went out I came back with a new species for the season. American Redstart, Magnolia Warbler, Canada Warbler, even a Blue-winged Warbler! We've had Red-breasted Nutchatches, a Carolina Wren, a Northern Cardinal... So many beautiful birds. I had to make a tough call on a Common Yellowthroat though - it was wrapped up so badly I could barely tell which side of the net it was on. I gave myself about fifteen seconds to figure it out and then called Lindsay. It even took her a bit, and I watched the whole procedure and there was absolutely no way I could have gotten that bird out safely. I'm glad to know my limits, though.

Tomorrow I get to shower! I don't know when, though. Kiiiinda busy. I might have to make it a 9:30pm shower, because I really think a 5am shower is out of the question. XD

Physically, I am doing waaaay better than I expected. The last time I was out here, I was a wreck by the second day. Hurting all over, intensely. Heart exploding when I went up the hill. I still need to pause halfway to catch my breath, but I find myself ready to go for every net run. I'm not as starving as I was last time, either. I think it honestly might be the Metformin kicking my body into actually getting energy from my food. Not complaining! XD

( Picture time! )