Sharlene and I got to sleep in this morning (until 6:30) since we’re finished with banding now. We might’ve tried to band a little this morning but decided against it since there was a chance of rain. Our our last day was very slow, with 5 birds caught and only 1 recapture. We also caught and marked 8 Rufous Hummingbirds (more on that later..).
It was so slow Sharlene and I decided to stalk some birds and try to get some good photos before we had to leave. I called in a banded Fox Sparrow and Sharlene got some good pictures of him, and a few nice photos of three Brown-headed Cowbirds and a European Starling that have been hanging around the solar panels and compost.
Six birds and no visitors! It was a pretty slow morning. The Coastal Guardian Watchmen just arrived to the island last night, too bad we will miss out on some great presentations, and possibly showing them banding! It’s the first big group of visitors we’ve seen up here.
In the afternoon yesterday we packed up all of our nets and got everything organized to leave. This morning we had our last amazing breakfast 😥 and will spend the next couple hours packing our bags and maybe doing some last-minute exploring.
I’ll post our final numbers later on today once we’re done travelling back to Nanaimo (or possibly tomorrow morning depending on what time that is!)
Our totals will be really interesting to have a closer look at, since we only really had that one day with a big influx of birds that quickly seemed to leave the area.
Banding at Calvert 