Once a team gets going, you can really assembly-line the process,
especially when all of the birds use the same size band. As a
volunteer at Whitefish Point Bird Observatory on Lake Superior in the
U-P of Michigan, a team of five of us banded 192 hawks in one five
hour period, 189 of which were Sharp-shins, 180 of which were females,
mostly second-year birds. We used three bow-nets surrounded by a
triangle plus extension of four mist nets, and lured using tethered
(and armored with leather "jackets") starlings, and also put out
pigeons whenever larger raptors were in the area. Three people were
busy luring and emptying the traps / nets, one person worked steadily
at measuring and banding, and the fifth (usually me) scribed data.
Whenever we got a breather, we rotated, and on a couple of occasions
when a Sharpie really got tangled, we shut down the traps for a few
minutes. The rest of the time, the hawks would come for a starling at
one trap while we were disentangling another one only 10-15 feet away.
It was really a hectic and _exhilarating_ morning! The last I heard,
that day in late April / early May is still their biggest Sharp-shin
day of banding at WPBO.


0> Bruce Helmboldt
_/_)_ bhelmboldt at seaao.dcmdw.dla.mil
/ Duvall, WA