On Fri, 7 Mar 1997, Bob Mauritsen wrote:

> For what it's worth, the last two times I walked the loop trail at
> Discovery Park, I noticed that many of the song sparrows northwest
> of the visitors center had multiple bands on both legs.
>
> Bob Mauritsen
> rhm at ms.washington.edu
>

Good observation! The Discovery Park song sparrows are part of a
long-term (10 years and counting) study of song learning and other
behaviors by Mike Beecher's lab at the UW. I and four to six other
grad students, post-docs, techs and volunteers of one stripe or another
band and record the songs of the approximately 150 resident song sparrow
males in Discovery Park. Near the Visitor's center, most of the females
are also banded.

If you wish to report color banded song sparrows to us, you can do so at
this e-mail address:

cehill at u.washington.edu

In return, I'll send you a brief history of the bird you report.

The birds at Discovery Park have four bands, two on each leg. One of the
bands is aluminum, the rest are plastic color bands in the following
colors: black, white, dark blue, light blue, dark green, light green,
orange, red, yellow, and purple. We need to know the position of all four
bands to tell you which individual you saw.

We cover most of the park pretty thoroughly, but observations of color
banded birds outside the park boundaries are especially valuable to us -
we band quite a few nestlings each year, and would like to know where they
end up. Anybody feed birds in Magnolia?

There will be a notice in the next WOSNews about this, I think.

The color banded bird at the Montlake Fill was probably banded by another
UW researcher. I have forwarded the note about that one to him.

Chris Hill
Everett, WA
cehill at u.washington.edu

and

Department of Zoology
University of Washington
P. O. Box 351800
Seattle, WA 98195-1800