I continue to band before and after work and all day on weekends on my two and a half acres along the Patuxent River gorge between highway 1-95 and the Laurel city limits. Our kids have long since flown the coop, so I have no one to run the station when I am out of town; thus, I miss some of the best flight days. The chief changes in habitat over the years have been replacement of pines by young deciduous growth, loss of dogwoods in the mature deciduous forest, and gradual replacement of lawn by shrubbery. To explore changes in fall migration patterns, I compared my banding totals for the first five years of systematic fall banding with those of the most recent five years. By coincidence the totals were nearly identical: 2175 birds in 1973-1977 and 2169 in 1997-2001. However, my net hour totals were vastly different: 9124 in the first five years compared with 26,284 for the current period. It took nearly 2.9 times the effort to catch the same number of birds I used to band. Next year, my 30th, I'll be checking to see which species I am losing and which are maintaining their numbers.
I had 35 returns of a dozen species, but all were either summer, winter, or permanent residents. The oldest this time was only four years old, a Gray Catbird. Eleven transients repeated on a subsequent day. The one longest in residence was a Gray-cheeked Thrush that l captured 10 times in 17 days; it weighed 31.0 g when banded and reached a maximum of 51.7 g 13 days later.
