Banding and tracking birds at Oak Hammock Marsh

Every half hour, staff and volunteers at Oak Hammock Marsh check on the dozen nets scattered around the site.

“We are fishing for birds,” said the marsh’s Resident Naturalist Paula Grieef with a chuckle. “It’s called mist netting for birds.”

The netting is fine enough to trap small songbirds, like sparrows, robins, and warblers. Staff gently untangle the birds and place them in a cloth bag before they weighed, measured, and given a small metal “bracelet” – a bird band, clamped around the bird’s leg and inscribed with an identification number.

“We’re putting a little metal band on it to gain as much information about the bird as we can… to know where they go, how they use Oak Hammock Marsh, where are they coming from, how healthy is the population,” Grieef said.

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The bands are issued to the Canadian Wildlife Service by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They’re then distributed to banding stations like the one at Oak Hammock Marsh. Oak Hammock Marsh’s station is the only to band and track songbirds in the province, but the data collected goes into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service database.

The marsh’s bird banding season lasts from July 15 to the end of September, and the “banders” will encounter roughly 100 species of songbirds in that time.

“Typically in one season for fall banding, we’ll do around 2,500 birds,” said Kelsey Bell, who heads the marsh’s banding station. “This year, we have caught over 3,000 and banded them.

While the increase in numbers looks promising on paper, Bell says it’s mainly due to some species having a surplus of food this year. The station saw a huge jump in the number of Tennessee warblers – small birds with yellow and white feathers – over last year. But Bell says that’s because they feed on spruce budworms, a type of moth that also saw a population boom this year.

“Songbirds in general are declining across Canada and North America,” she said.

While avian flu is a threat to some of the other birds that frequent the marsh, like geese and ducks, Bell says most songbirds don’t carry the disease. The main contributors to the overall population decline are habitat and food source loss.

Visitors to Oak Hammock Marsh on Sunday had the chance to watch staff trap and band birds. Jimm Simon of Stonewall has been coming to Oak Hammock Marsh for over 30 years and calls himself an “amateur bird watcher.”

“We learned so much about bird banding,” he said. “It’s fascinating to see that stuff.”

Oak Hammock Marsh’s fall banding season ends for the year Oct. 1.

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