It rained last night, which sounded really nice in the tent. That meant that it was cloudy in the morning as I tried to find my Hermit Thrush (dubbed HETH 3), that I had caught yesterday. No luck. I climbed up and down that mountain slope, and got zip. When trying with Edward's receiver, he got a signal, and my mentor John Gerwin joined us. We chased the thrush to a fern bed...and didn't even see the bird. You have to estimate a lot when doing radio telemetry, because half the time (or more) you don't see the bird because it flushed/flew away. So I marked the point with a GPS and recorded the coordinates, and went out on my own to try to find the bird. I chased it down another mountain and across a ravine, where I finally got a clear view of where it was. Telemetry is basically this: patience, determination, and purposeful walking. I know all of you are planning to do telemetry at some point, so now you know.
Lunch :)
It was actually only Edward, Vanessa, and I eating lunch by the trail that afternoon, because John was busy untangling a Hermit Thrush from the net. He caught this thrush in order to put color bands on it. I have a vision of the trail with thrushes with different color bands branching out on either side of the trail: a visual map of how many thrushes/thrush pairs are in that specific area. Hermit Thrushes are little-known because barely anyone has studied them, so it's our job to collect as much data as possible on these birds now.
Well, then the rain came. We decided to stop doing telemetry, and took a drive up to Mt. Mitchell to look at the small museum they had there. It was really cool! There was a lot of historic information about Mitchell himself, and the man who found his dead body, Tom Wilson. Tom Wilson was a longtime land owner in the Mitchell area, and his family still owns land there today. The Park Service and Forest Service salivate over that land, but they can't do anything to it since the Wilson family won't give it up.
I saw two lifers today, meaning two birds that I have never seen before. The first was a Canada Warbler, which is a beautiful small warbler that breeds in the mountains. We all saw it on the drive up to the study trail that morning, and it responded to the playback that Edward played. It has a necklace of black encircling its throat, and bold black markings on the face. It's white eye ring is prominent on it's blue face. They have a beautiful light song too. The other lifer was a Veery, a close relative to a Hermit Thrush. It flew across the road, and we called it back in using playback in order to get a better look at it. They have a dusting of light brown/cinnamon spots on the breast, unlike the dark brown, ample amount of spots on the Hermit Thrush and Wood Thrush. They are also a lighter brown on the back. Their song is strange but lovely: a metallic whirring downward spiral.
Monday June 6
So we got up a little late this morning, and packed up our stuff. Then we went to a gas station ten minutes away so that John could fill up his tank, and by then it was 9:30. Who cares? is what we said. We went up to the BKR Trail--John and Edward to do more telemetry, and Vanessa and I to scout out for a Blackburnian Warbler nest. I have dubbed Blackburnian Warblers as Cheeto birds, because that's what they look like. The males have this ridiculously bright patch of orange on their throats and faces, whereas the females have a butter yellow instead. We had seen a female on the trail collecting nest material, and so we went to see if we could follow her to her nest. Except we didn't see her until we had given up because we had to drive home. We saw her then, peering at the both of us, then flitting away. Then she didn't come back, and though we saw the Cheeto male, he was high up in a conifer foraging, thus wouldn't be helping with the nest-building. Oh, well, it was interesting to see the two of them, and some Golden-crowned Kinglets and a Hairy Woodpecker along the way.
We drove home listening to NPR and the Avett Brothers--what better mix is there than that?
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| Blackburnian Warbler male: See? It's a Cheeto bird |
| Canada Warbler male |
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| Veery! |
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| Happy Golden-crowned Kinglet (what you usually see). . . |
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| Angry Golden-crowned Kinglet |
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| Hairy Woodpecker |
And, last but not least:
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| THE AVETT BROTHERS--so awesome |
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