snow bunting bingo!!

The greatest thrill for any bird bander is capturing a bird that someone else has banded.  It is so exciting that extra care has to be taken to absolutely make sure that the number has been written down properly. We often will get a second observer  to  read and record the number, we also read the number backwards to make sure we have it right. In the olden days we would have to wait and call the number in and wait for the report to come to us. Now with high tech gizmo's and  government websites we can find out almost instantly where a bird was originally banded. When it was banded. Who it was banded by and how old the bird was at the time of banding. Catching a bird banded by another bander allows us to draw a line between two points, the original capture and the retrap sites. For me though it is the adventure between these points and the passion of the banders that is the real story. Of course the other important dialogue here is the biologists that are trying to make sense of it all.   Aldo Leopold said it so well when he wrote  "putting a band on a bird is to hold a ticket in a great lottery" Whenever we catch someone else's bird I always think bingo we just won the lottery!  It is hard to imagine all of the choices and challenges in the life of a banded bird  that  can lead this bird into one of our traps so many miles away from where the bird was originally banded.

       This past Saturday we recaptured our 6th bird banded just outside of Arthur Ontario by David
Lamble. David Lamble has banded more snow buntings then anyone else in Ontario and we have now established that we have a migration corridor between our two sites. This defied the original theory that southern flocks  breed and have different migration routes then their Northern cousins. These recaptures are showing that there is absolutely a migration corridor between Arthur and Timiskaming. We have also caught birds banded by David Lamble now in three different years of banding which shows even though it is still huge to catch what we refer to as a "foreign" bird  we are not surprised when his name pops up on a computer screen .Especially when we know how many birds he has put bands on.
     The other aspect of the snow bunting sojourn that defies my imagination is where these birds wander  and the possibility that one day one of our birds may end up in Greenland.  Birds banded in southern Ontario have been discovered in Greenland. To be more accurate some of the flocks in Timiskaming may be breeding in Greenland already but we just do not know it yet. As some of you saw during the marsh social  snow buntings were being banded in the arctic near Iqaluit which is a mere jump to Greenland for a bunting.  The work the kids are doing at Kerns Public is huge in helping paint a picture of the bunting migration. Thank goodness for those young banders at Kerns Public!! Not only have they caught some Lamble birds but three of their birds have been retrapped in Quebec. Two of them were caught not far from the Gaspe Bay which may have been a stop on their way to... you guessed it Greenland. Oh what it would be like to migrate to Greenland . Maybe one day I will just have to find out for myself. For now I will keep holding tickets to the most amazing lottery on the planet and keep banding buntings.