Hello all,
Today, the American Birding Association’s blog posted a neat account of
Idaho’s significant hummingbird banding operation(s). I encourage you to
take a gander, especially if you are unaware, like myself prior to reading
the blog, of the history and current status of Idaho hummingbirds and the
research being done!
Austin Young
Pocatello, ID
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: ABA Blog
Date: Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 6:30 AM
Subject: [New post] Open Mic: Idaho’s Humbanders and Their Discoveries
To: austinyoung234@gmail.com
Nate Swick posted: “At the Mic: Elise Faike In the early 2000s, Stacy Jon
Peterson and Fred Bassett arrived in Idaho within a week of each other and
started banding hummingbirds. With several assistants, they explored
Idaho’s hummingbird inhabitants throughout the state. ”
New post on *ABA Blog*
Open Mic: Idaho’s Humbanders and
Their Discoveries
by
Nate Swick
*At the Mic: Elise Faike*
In the early 2000s, Stacy Jon Peterson and Fred Bassett arrived in Idaho
within a week of each other and started banding hummingbirds. With several
assistants, they explored Idaho’s hummingbird inhabitants throughout the
state. I first met them when Stacy accepted an invitation to visit my home
in Challis in 2004. It was fascinating to watch him capture hummers on my
back deck and band them right on my dining room table! The coolest part was
holding the tiny creatures for release. Their rapidly beating hearts felt
electric on my palm.
Stacy and I visited neighbors and friends nearby to see what hummers are
here. When he couldn’t return to Challis in 2006, Fred came instead and
brought along Carl Rudeen. They also banded in North Fork and Gibbonsville,
where they caught a hummer in 2006 that was banded two months before in
Montana, thus defining a previously unknown southward migration route.
They found that Idaho has five commonly occurring hummingbird species:
Black-chinned, Broad-tailed, Rufous, Calliope, and Anna’s. The first four
occur during summer months and Anna’s often overwinter at heated feeders.
Others rarely seen or captured in Idaho include Broad-billed, Costa’s,
Ruby-throated, and the infrequent hybrid. Except for Anna’s, Idaho’s
hummers primarily winter in Mexico.
The author holds a Rufous Hummingbird captured at the Rudeen Ranch
Hummingbird Roundup in southeastern Idaho
While many bird banders will choose a location and return annually, Idaho
Humbanders also like going wherever the hummers are, when circumstances
allow. Early on they hadn’t yet selected many project areas, except the
Rudeen Ranch in Southeastern Idaho in 2003, one of the first places they
banded. Now they concentrate their efforts throughout southern Idaho,
mostly at private homes.
Both Stacy and Fred were master banders when they came to Idaho. Stacy
added Carl Rudeen as a sub-permittee on his permit in 2006, Fred trained
him, and Carl has since attained his master bander status.
Carl grew up on his family’s ranch watching hundreds of hummers, always
wanting to study them. He’s conducting research on spatial hummingbird
biology and populations at Rudeen Ranch and will eventually publish a
summary of data from the ranch. He also continues to monitor Anna’s
Hummingbirds and believes there is a range expansion by that species into
southwestern Idaho. He has noticed more summer observations of Anna’s which
were previously only found in Idaho during the winter.
Jessica Pollock is Idaho’s newest Humbander. She was an experienced
Humbander when she arrived from British Columbia in 2011 to work as
Research Biologist at Boise State University’s Intermountain Bird
Observatory (IBO). IBO conducts ongoing songbird and raptor projects on
Lucky Peak and elsewhere, but didn’t yet have a Humbanding program until
Jessica initiated one. (Such small birds require different banding skills,
procedures, and permits than other birds, although if one was caught, data
were collected and stored in house without banding it.) Jessica is a
sub-permittee of IBO’s master permit. She also bands songbirds, owls, and
large raptors.
It took Jessica only two seasons to find the perfect project area: private
land near Idaho City with an unusually high concentration of breeding
Calliopes, where in 2012 she established a unique long-term research
endeavor to study them. It’s the only breeding Calliope station in the
Hummingbird Monitoring Network, which tracks all species at sites in the
U.S., Canada, and Mexico (http://www.hummonnet.org/index.html).
*Interesting Idaho Discoveries*
Idaho Humbanders have observed some cool things about hummingbirds. Jessica
once caught a gravid Calliope at Idaho City and could see the egg through
its skin, then recaptured her a couple of hours later and the egg was gone!
Jessica remarked, “She was healthy and energetic and I’m sure she’d just
laid her egg in a nest nearby.”
Carl has noticed how tough and resilient hummingbirds are. “Birds really
aren’t as fragile as you’d think,” he says. “It’s still snowing when they
show up in spring, migrating tremendous distances through extreme weather.”
Carl and Stacy have learned that, “a fairly high proportion of the
population is long-lived”. Before closing the last trap at Rudeen Ranch in
2010, Stacy recaptured #N05909, a Black-chinned first banded there as an
after-hatch-year bird in 2003, which made it 8+ years old. They recaptured
it every year until then!
Jessica also “recaptured a male Calliope on April 27, 2016 that we
initially banded in 2012 and we have caught him every single year since
2012. He was an adult in 2012, so he is at least 5 years old and likely
older”.
Several other 8-year-olds have also been recaptured at Rudeen Ranch. In
2015, Stacy recaptured #N57688, another after-hatch-year Black-chinned
first banded in 2004, making it more than 11 years old. It was recaptured
six of 11 years. “About 30% of the birds we catch are returns from previous
bandings at the ranch,” Carl says. “More old birds could be out there.”
Fred bands birds all over the country, which gives him a good overview of
hummer populations nationwide. Bergmann’s Rule (usually applied to mammals)
holds that animals are bigger in the north than the south, because larger
individuals can withstand colder temperatures better, and he’s discovered
that “Black-chinned Hummingbird sizes get larger as you go north. The
largest ones are in Idaho. All other hummer species are the same sizes.”
Idaho’s Humbanders always look forward to their next banding sessions; they
know their next exciting discovery is only a matter of time. It will be
interesting to learn more about hummingbird natural history and behavior as
their research activities continue in Idaho.
–=====–
*Elise Faike is a geologist and adventure travel planner who lives in
Challis, Idaho, with her husband Dave and little Blue Heeler Tater. She
enjoys birding and watching wildlife locally and around the world. She also
likes holding and releasing banded birds whenever possible for her “Birds
Held” list. *
*Nate Swick * | October 31, 2017 at 8:00 am
| URL: https://wp.me/p4fXID-5Kn
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Austin Young
