The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
A BAND OF BIRDERS
Connecticut Audubon Society helps keep tabs on ecology, migration
The gray catbirds, white-throated sparrows and other songbirds don’t see the nets until they’re caught in their fine filaments, but they end up flying away with a little bling on their legs.
The volunteers at the Connecticut Audubon Society’s Birdcraft Museum in Fairfield band 1,000 birds a year, building on years’ worth of knowledge about the delicate creatures.
“Bird banding is a scientific way of gathering information,” said Judy Richardson of Fairfield, master bird bander for Connecticut Audubon. “We’re studying migration of birds that come up here from South America to nest and they go back in the fall because there are no insects to eat.
“Birds are great indicators of the environment, remembering the canary in the mine,” she said. “Their metabolisms are much faster, they’re much smaller. Whatever affects them will eventually affect us.”
Richardson said a bird lover has to be an optimist “because so much is wrong: so much destruction of land, so much habitat destroyed … overdevelopment.”
Cat owners may not like to hear it, but their pets are possibly the biggest threat to songbirds, killing 1 billion a year nationwide, Richardson said. “Cats eat 300 songbirds each year, so we’re talking millions and millions of birds,” Richardson said.
“We’re monitoring migration,” Richardson said of the banders’ task. “The bigger picture is to see how they’re doing in the environment and therefore how we’re doing in the environment.”
“We’ve found our herons have gone to the Caribbean islands in the past,” said Darlene Moore of Farmington. “You want to preserve both habitats.”
The 103-year-old Birdcraft Museum off Unquowa Road “is like a mini-Central Park” for the birds, Richardson said. “There’s a place to eat, a place to hide and a place to rest.”
It’s a welcoming oasis, planted with winter-berries and asters, where in the 1920s, “30,000 people in long white dresses and opera glasses came out to look at birds.” But it’s so close to Interstate 95 that, in the 1950s, half of the land was taken to build a highway rest stop.
“That used to be ours and now it’s full of trucks,” said Patty Scott of Wilton.
Each year, from late March or early April until almost Thanksgiving, the bird banders make their rounds several times in the morning and evening, looking for birds that have gotten caught in the 17 almost invisible nets. (The nets are furled during the day and overnight.) Sure enough, a ground warbler or an ovenbird will have gotten caught. The banders gently untangle the frightened creatures, tuck them safely into a cloth bag and bring them into the museum to be banded.
When it’s taken out of the bag, the bird tends to relax in the bander’s hand.
“When we hold the birds, there’s no bad juju, so to speak, no bad pheromones,” Richardson said. “They’re not worried. You’re not in attack mode like a hawk would be or a cat would be. … They just patiently wait.”
The bander uses special pliers to close the band — “his new bling” — around the bird’s leg and “he wears it like a wristwatch,” Richardson said. Each band’s unique number is recorded in a logbook, along with the
bird’s weight, the length of its wing and its age, which is determined by the amount of fat on its body, the color of its plumage and iris and by whether its skull has closed up (hatchlings have a soft spot on their skull like a human baby does).
As surprising as it may seem, sometimes the banders retrieve a bird they’ve banded before. By catching birds that have been banded elsewhere it’s possible to trace their migration routes. All the information about each bird is sent to the Bird Banding Laboratory at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., a division of the U.S. Geological Survey.
“A chickadee that I banded was found in North Carolina and was 7 years old,” said Linda Morgens of Norwalk. “It was dead and we were lucky the people took the band and submitted it” to the national lab.
State’s No. 1: The gray catbird
Richardson said the most successful native bird in Connecticut is the gray catbird. The banders ignore house sparrows and starlings, which are invasive species and which, while common in more developed areas, aren’t found too often in the Birdcraft Museum’s sanctuary anyway. “They’re European species; they’re not native,” said Richardson.
The white-throated sparrow, on the other hand, is interesting because it flies to Connecticut in the winter. “They live up in the tundra, the boreal forests” of Maine and Canada, Richardson said. “But they come here for the winter because they can survive on seeds as well as bugs.”
On the other hand, “a lot of our warblers that eat only insects here will eat fruit in South America,” she said.
“Springtime, when they’re first coming north to breed is a really busy time,” Richardson said. “We’ve caught 124 different (species of) birds here. A lot would be warblers. Gray catbirds and thrushes and robins, you name it.”
‘They can teach us all’
“For me personally, I just wanted to learn more about birds,” Moore said. “I like the scientific aspect of it. There’s a lot of data you can get from birds, for ecology in general … and I think they have something that they can teach us all.”
Moore said the educational aspect of the museum is important to her. “You just don’t know what impact you’ll make on a small child when you listen to a bird’s heartbeat.”
“It’s life-changing to put a bird in a kid’s hand,” Richardson said. Today’s children have “a disconnection from nature,” she said. “It’s a nature-deficit disorder. We feel very responsible that we should be bringing the inner city here to see birds. … It’s a way of giving back. We want everybody to have the same possibilities that we have.”
The Connecticut Audubon Society also has done studies on West Nile virus and bird flu as part of its research mission.
The Birdcraft Museum — it is currently closed for renovation, but the grounds are open — “is an unusual place,” Morgens said. “We have the teaching gardens, the pond and the bird walk teaching pavilion. This was a shack.
“One of the reasons I went with this organization (is) this had many more centers and much more work that needed doing,” Morgens said. The Connecticut Audubon Society is not affiliated with the National Audubon Society.