Subject: Re: Sharpie banding
Date: Aug 25 09:57:55 1995
From: Don Baccus - donb at Rational.COM


Bruce:
> The last I heard,
> that day in late April / early May is still their biggest Sharp-shin
> day of banding at WPBO.

That's a lot of sharpies! I was amazed at the percentage of SY birds
until I saw the words "April" and "May".

The most birds banded in a day in one blind at the Goshtues is 145.
On that day there were something like 60 Coops and 60 sharpies banded
with another 15 or so Kestral and the rest a motely collection of
goshawks, RTs, merlin, and the like. We think we can do better.
Banding tends to be a bottleneck, we get enough variety that banders
have to track a bunch of rings, data sheets, pliers etc and it slows
folks down. Then, just when things are under control some fool catches
an eagle or something and really monkeywrenches the day.

I've got three days under my belt of leading a blind to a 100+ day,
but don't have the record. Then again, no one else has more than on
100+ day (so there!). We tend to dump a lot of sharpies and kestrals
into mist nets and dho-gazas, which spares our lure birds (which we have
to backpack up) but makes it difficult to empty nets quickly. A trade-off
due to our remote locations - Cape May, for instance, traps bownets
preferentially while using a dho-gaza behind to catch misses, where we place
our dho-gazas placed in front of the bownet, and preferentially steer
the raptor into it. At Cape May, though, you live in houses and drive
to work. Luxury!

Of course, our lures are also protected by leather harnesses.


- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>