Sparrow Roundup

This past Saturday, we had our first Coastal Plains Swamp Sparrow Roundup. Ray Danner, a PhD student with the Avian Ecology lab at Virginia Tech, agreed to let volunteers through the NCWRC assist with his preleminary research near Swan Quarter, NC. Myself and six others were on hand entirely too early in the morning and in desperate need of coffee. We began by hearing a little about Ray's project and what his aims are. Basically, the coastal plains subspecies of the Swamp Sparrow is being studied because of its unique environmental constraints. It winters in only a small area, summers in only a small area and acts in a way that distances itself from other Swamp Sparrow's. One peculiarity is in its feeding methods, rooting around in the mud in addition to seed eating, so much to the point that many of the dubious critters have their beaks slathered with muck. Strange, but Ray says that this may be the beginnings of a new evolutionary divergence that has already manifested itself and created similar attributes in Seaside Sparrows.

Whew, that being out of the way, we progressed to the fun stuff. Normally when out biriding, bird-equette requires those participating to adopt a state of near silence in order to "keep an ear out". This day, however, was entirely different. Shouting and stamping, blurting and belting, rousing choruses of "Grandma got run over by a Reindeer" lit the morning with a foul din as we actively engaged in a process called flush-netting to scare the sparrows into nets we had set up. Ray justified this practice saying they had tried passive netting where bird simply wander into the nets, but this is usually done at dawn when the birds are trying to reach their feeding grounds as opposed to when they are already there, which is what we were doing. Personally, I'd much rather be bothered at work than have my boss yell at me for being late, but I digress.

We had some success and ended up with 6 birds to process, 3 of which had been banded previously (Ray had done one himself in the same spot last year). Getting to see these birds up close was a very unique opportunity and I hope that we will be able to repeat it sometime in the coming months. Ray is planning on being here for at least the nex three months, and I hope his research goes well. By the way, I've put a slide shoe up of the Sparrow Roundup pictures to the right, click on the thumbnails to see the full size shots and make sure to check out Sarah with the House Wren.