Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 303
March weather continues up and down in temperature, some rain and some snow but no big snowstorm so far, but the month is not over. It may go out as a lamb or a lion only time will tell. Birds are on the move and so far, they are doing ok. I’ve had a Robin in the yard for over a week, and stuck out the Merlin app and he was still here last night even though I didn’t hear him. The Pine Siskins have come in big numbers to join the American Goldfinch which have been counted as eighty to one hundred each day. Yesterday after a half inch of snow fell overnight the Slate Colored Juncos numbered twenty- five, and they had to jockey for position on the platform feeder along with the Chickadees.
I looked out at daylight Sunday and there was a Robin checking things out among the Goldfinch and Siskins on the ground under the feeders, then a Common Grackle joined the mix. I had a little excitement that morning as I only had two Potter traps set as it was too cold and windy to put up the net. I was catching three to eight each trip out as everyone wanted to eat that morning. On the next trip out I had two Juncos in one trap and three Siskins in the other. I bent down to pick out a Junco and a Northern Shrike came down, almost hitting me as it tried to get one of the birds in the trap. It landed on the trap right beside me a couple times before going back into the balsam overhead. I picked out one bird and opened the other three doors of the trap. I went over to the other trap and picked out those birds. The Shrike came down trying to catch the Junco in the other trap and it went in one of the open doors to get at this bird and he was caught. I picked out the Junco and then picked out the Shrike, which because of their bite and hawklike feet, you must be careful. This is the first Shrike I’ve had around the feeders in a couple of years. I got it banded with no blood loss and took a couple of photos. About an hour later a Sharp Shinned Hawk came in trying to flush a bird out of the Potter trap, but it couldn’t get out. It sat in the trees overhead after making a few more attempts to flush this bird. I got some good photos as it sat in the tree flicking its tail. It finally flew off down the ski trail when I went out to pick the trapped birds. I banded nearly fifty birds that day and ended with a beautiful Fox Sparrow as the last bird.
The Pine Siskins come down from the far north and live high in the trees feeding on cones to raise their young. They don’t regularly see humans so when I’m picking others out of the Potter traps, they will land right beside me picking seeds. They are pretty little birds; the males have lots of yellow on the wings and their butts are all yellow. The females have little yellow on them. The first banded bird I ever found was a Pine Siskin that got killed in the road up by Golden Beach along with some White Winged Crossbills. Reporting the band to the banding lab, the bird had been banded out in Minnesota a couple of years earlier. They are very nomadic following seed crops on the evergreens and some probably did nest this winter in this area with the big seed crops on the red spruce. I found several nesting during the winter in the eighty-bird atlas along with the White Winged Crossbills that winter.
April will be here next week so be on the watch for some of those April Fools out there, but that is another story. See ya.
Photo Above: Shrike in potter trap
