On Fri, 1 Sep 1995, Dennis Paulson wrote:
> Watch for these birds; some of them are surely headed for our region.
> Although he didn't say, I assume any reports of them should be sent to
> Robert Gill, National Biological Service, Alaska Science Center, 1011 E.
> Tudor Rd., Anchorage, AK 99503.

Hi Tweets,

Thanks Dennis for the note on Dunlin. I'll be at Ocean Shores this
weekend and will watch for any.

For other tweets who might be shorebirding this weekend, if you see
color-banded shorebirds, the following information is NECESSARY:

species
location
date/time
band combinations

When you record color band combinations, record the order of the colors,
which leg they were on, and their position relative to the 'knee'. I'm a
little rusty on this (maybe someone else will pipe in here), but I
believe we used the following formula previously (It's been 4 years since
I've done this):

WESA OY,GM:,W

This records the species as a Western Sandpiper (WESA). The commas
indicate the 'knees' of the birds, the colon breaks between left and
right legs, and from left to right is top to bottom on the bird. The
example above looks like this:

bird body bird body
left leg orange right leg (nothing)
yellow (nothing)
'knee' 'knee'
green white
metal USFWS band (nothing)
bird 'foot' bird 'foot'

Make sure you record the position of the legs relative to the bird, not to
you. Also many birds are marked with flags. These are bands with a
'tail' that's obviously protruding from the band. You can use a lowercase
'f' to indicate a flag (Gf = green flag) in the formula above. These
generally indicate country. Anybody know the colors and what countries
they're from? I remember finding a SESA in Alaska, with a flag from Peru!
But I forget the colors now (green = USA).

-------------
Michael R. Smith
Univ. of Washington, Seattle
whimbrel at u.washington.edu
http://salmo.cqs.washington.edu/~wagap/mike.html