I woke up at 5:30, a more usual time to get up for bird work. By 6:30 my group was heading out to the trail. I worked with the first Hermit Thrush that we caught yesterday, the one that first arrived with food in his mouth. I was really excited to figure out where he was hanging out and see if I could find his nest. Telemetry is essentially just horizontally waving around a receiver that looks like a lightning rod and hearing how loud it beeps when you point it in different directions. If it beeps loudly to the left, the bird is to the left. Once you get relatively close to the bird, within 25 meters, it is useful to turn the gain down so that the beeping is not so loud. If the gain is not turned down, then it seems like it is beeping from all directions, but it becomes softer and more attuned if you turn the gain down. A good way to attune the receiver is to tilt it at an angle. It is helpful to swish the receiver vertically to see if the bird is in a tree or on the ground. Once the bird is seen or you can determine the bird's location within about 10 meters, a GPS is used to mark the point. A data sheet is used to record the coordinates (in case the GPS gets lost or damaged, the coordinates will still be known), vegetation, any notes about behavior if the bird was seen or heard, the time the bird's location was known (observation time), among other information.
Telemetry Tips:
- If the bird is singing and you mark a point on the GPS, then try to find the bird twenty minutes later and he is still singing, just extend the observation time and make a note.
- Know the species' behavior so that you can mark the approximate point without a visual. I didn't get a single point after two hours of crashing around in the forest and then forty-five minutes trying to find the trail because I wanted a visual. I had to get over the fact that, especially with elusive Hermit Thrushes, a visual is not common.
- Look around as you track the bird so that you can take a relatively easy, quite path through the woods in the bird's direction.
- Canada Warbler was a lifer! After ungracefully trouncing through the woods for thirty minutes, this beautiful male Canada Warbler approached me. He "chucked" at me, cocking his little blue-gray head with his daffodil-yellow eye ring and bare throat heavy with a necklace of dainty black drops. I spished (a "shhhppshppshhh" sound that birders do to call in and rile up birds) and he came closer. He was at eye-level and was only about a meter away!
- Smooth rock tripe is an edible fungus-type creature that lives on the enormous boulders in the Black Mountains
- A Blackburnian Warbler female was on the ground near the fallen-down shed that sits by the trail. She was quite close to me and my group as we watched her, pausing our walk up the trail to our van. We couldn't figure out why she was on the ground since she didn't seem to be picking anything up.
- The view from both sides of the overlook, which we visited after a day of fieldwork, was spectacular. I saw clouds lilting in the coves and valleys of the Black Mountains as a male Ruby-throated Hummingbird displayed to his female. The hummingbirds do their courtship displays by flying in a very shallow U-shape in front of their prospective mates, flashing their metallic crimson throats. A male Blackburnian was foraging nearby, his throat shining like a sunset with a red-orange center. I saw a male Indigo Bunting fly into his mate from behind, causing a scuffle a whir of feathers and bodies into the long grass and out of sight. They were done copulating in less than fifteen seconds, and we all made a couple of suggestive jokes, laughing. Lastly, a Red-breasted Nuthatch alighted on the very tip-top of a Red Spruce tree, "singing" his gruff alarm-clock call for about a minute.
- At 9:00 pm, a chorus of more than a hundred fireflies began shining their lights. They looked like bits of shattered glass, not calm or soothing but flashing their fiery orbs in erratic and slightly rhythmic bursts.
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