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A Bird in the Hand

Fall 2006 Newsletter

When I was a little child, my grandmother told me that if I sprinkled salt on a bird’s tail, I would be able to catch that bird any time I wanted. Thinking it would be fun to have a bird at my beck and call, I would tiptoe around the yard with a salt shaker. The birds, alas, were a lot smarter than I was.

I thought of this old wives’ tale when early on a Thursday morning in June, six of us met at Lost Mound Refuge with Dr. Dan Wenny, ornithologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey, to help with the banding of birds.

Although I knew that nets, and not salt, would be used, I wondered how something so delicate as a bird could be captured and banded without harming its tiny legs or wings and how large a window one would have between the time a bird was caught in the net and when it would have to be taken and released.

The nets, of course, must be very thin and black so that the birds will not see them. Dan uses a system for rolling them up so that they could be hung on a pole, unwound without getting tangled, and finally attached to another pole about twenty feet away. We helped set up eight or nine nets, near small cedar trees that would be good perching places, and waited a few minutes for results. Dan said better luck could be had without wind (the birds would see the fluttering movement) and without bright sun. He said the nets should be checked at least every twenty minutes.

Soon two birds were fluttering in our trap: a patient Grasshopper Sparrow and a struggling, squawking Dickcissel. Dan put them in bags, weighed them and carefully measured the wing, the tail and the tarsus, or leg bone. He then placed a band on one of the legs and recorded all the information. He showed us how to hold the birds; it’s fun to release them and watch them fly away. The really hard part was untangling the bird from the net (Dan wisely did this himself).

One little sparrow was so entangled it took about five minutes to get all parts of the net unwound from her body. Pulling too hard would hurt the bird (and wouldn’t work anyway); cutting the net would eventually render it useless. Patience is certainly one of the cardinal (no pun intended) virtues.

Dan explained that anyone finding the birds would call the Bird Banding Lab at Pautuxent Wildlife Research Center. Thus data could be accumulated such as the age of the bird, where it winters and what route it travels. Overall we captured and marked four Grasshopper Sparrows, two Eastern Meadowlarks and one Dickcissel.

One of the Grasshopper Sparrows was a recapture of a bird originally banded near the same location in 2004. We were all glad to have participated in this interesting educational experience and to have learned more about birds: a far cry from trying to spill salt on their tails!

—Pat Wemstrom