April

Well that was an interesting little hiatus. Usually, when I take a break from blogging it's because there's nothing interesting happening in my life that I want to share, but this month it's been because I've been super busy. My schedule hasn't completely eased up, but I'm making time for an update!

Bird Banding
I spent two weeks in the middle of April volunteering with a bird banding project at Iona Beach near the Vancouver Airport. Bird banding is a method of monitoring bird populations that both remain in an area and migrate through it. You do this by setting up mist nets (ie. very fine nets that the birds have trouble seeing) and checking at regular intervals if they have caught anything (usually every 30 minutes, so the birds don't get too cold from having their wings all dishevelled). Then you carefully extract the birds. This is the hardest part because the birds can get themselves quite tangled and you don't want to hurt them. Once the birds are extracted, you put them in a cloth bag until you get to the banding stations, so they calm down.

Once back, you take the bird out of the bag, making sure you're holding it properly with it's head between your index and middle finger and the rest of your hand cupping it's body. Then we get to the actual banding. If the bird hasn't been captured before you get to take a tiny metal band with a number imprinted on it, open it, and close it around the bird's leg like an anklet. You record the number and all the bird's vital statistics; age, sex, wing length, tail length, fat stored, weight and any other comments about their health. Then you release the bird and if you recapture it you can learn more about the local population. Since you're never going to catch all the birds and the ones that have been captured once are going to be more cautious about getting caught again, you can't tell the total population by doing this, but you can get an idea of whether it's stable, growing or declining!

Bird banding is something that I've wanted to try doing since I was in first year of university. In my first forestry class, they had us write up a resume of how we would like our resume to look once we'd finished university. It was a really neat exercise and definitely gave me an idea of possible summer work experiences and internships I could participate in. A lot of the really interesting ones were bird banding, for two reasons. One, a lot of them were international and in the tropics at that! And two, there was so much variety in the type of projects and what you could learn. Birds are, I suppose, similar to a lot of other things in nature in that you don't really find them interesting until you learn more about them. I can definitely understand the appeal of birding, especially after my hands on experience banding. There are so many different kinds of birds, even in a place like Canada, and compared to mammals, amphibians and even insects, they're relatively easy to spot or identify by their calls.

I had a great experience banding and it was nice to put my degree to good use, especially since I'd been feeling that it's been a little wasted working at the restaurant. While I may not have been the most helpful person on the banding team, I learned a lot. I especially learned that handling birds is just a lot about experience and practice. The man running the whole program was amazing! A birding wizard! He was able to tell when you had got one step and were ready to move onto the next, even if you weren't sure you were ready. You could tell he'd been bird handling for years and was really comfortable with it.

One day, it was right when we had arrived at 5:30am, we were walking along the paths opening up the mist nets and there on the path in front of us was a little Northern Saw Whet Owl sitting on a vole on the path in front of us. Apparently these tiny owls have a "dear in the headlights" reaction to light, so the wizard whips out his cell phone and ninja slowly stalks the owl with his hand. He moves so slowly you can barely tell he's moving and then SNAP! He reaches down and quickly grabs the owl with his bare hands! It was abosolutely amazing and after he let us all hold the incredibley light and soft saw whet owl. It was such an awesome (in the true sense of the word) experience and made me wish to aspire to such natural greatness!