Thursday, August 13, 2009

Uncle Jim Bands Terns

My Uncle Jim, bird mentor extraordinaire, often takes part in bird banding projects throughout the year. This summer, he traveled to Pamlico Sound, the largest lagoon on the Eastern seaboard and in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, to band young terns. A 45 minute boat ride from Cedar Island brought the group to a small island with breeding tern colonies.



Click on the picture below for a larger look at the amazing column of terns waiting to be banded

Accompanied by his son, JP, seen here on the left, they and their group banded 5,564 (!!!!) terns in 5 hours! Pretty intense work. It helped that the terns were too young to fly, so they were easily corralled and the group culled off 500 at a time. Don't they look cute all penned up and waiting for their turn/ tern (hee, hee) to get a little bling clipped onto their leg? It was a colony of mostly young royal terns with about 600 sandwich terns mixed in.



I wish I had been there - what an awesome way to spend a day - on a beautiful island in the Outer Banks with over 5,000 baby shorebirds and doing a needed bit for bird research.

6 comments:

Russ said...

How do they get the birds to line up like that? Were there free donuts or something?

Beth said...

Hi Russ: So cool to see you commenting on my blog. Long-time lurker, first-time poster. Anyhoo, LOL about the donuts. But Jim says they couldn't fly yet so they were easy to corral. They look so puzzled, don't they?

See ya, dude,
Beth

jalynn01 said...

I just was shaking my head when you said they were lined up for their banding!!! How did they do that? Then you gave it away by saying they can't fly yet. Dah! I wouldn't have thought of that. Cool pictures!

Susan Gets Native said...

HOLY F***!!!!!
Over 5000???? IN FIVE F***ING HOURS!!

That rocks so damn hard, I can barely stand it!

Kathie Brown said...

I can't even imagine this! I am speachless!

dguzman said...

What Susan said, only without the ***s! Amazing!