Week 4:
Audobon Center at Francis Beidler Forest

June 9, 2014

This week at Beidler Forest was entertaining. It started off wonderfully on Monday. Matt, Mark, and I spent the whole day catching Prothonotary Warblers that we haven’t caught yet along the boardwalk. From monitoring all week, I learned where the unbanded male and female birds like to hang out. This is another benefit to monitoring every day: when it comes time to band, I am the go-to guy to tell everyone where to set up the mist net. Between the excitement of catching and holding birds and the pleasure of good company, it was a fun day. In all we caught 5 birds, 4 males and 1 female. Like I have said before, it is harder to catch females because you have to net them on the nest. They are not provoked by a male song and wooden dummy bird!…A sexual difference that some may find interesting. We caught this female in our mist net by complete accident as it was flying through the swamp. While attempting to get the attention of a male nearby, this female took us by surprise. I’m sure she was not so pleasantly surprised though. Matt told me as we were packing up that the old Director of Bird Conservation rarely had a day over 4 or 5 birds caught and banded when he was here. So be it luck or some skill unknown to us, we caught a high number of birds for one day of banding. This will make it possible for me to develop territories for them now that I can uniquely identify them.

Birding with Matt and Mark is fun because they both like to personify the birds and other wildlife we see. We saw some fledgling Prothonotary Warblers (fledglings are baby birds with their flight feathers grown in) pestering their mom by making little squeaks and rubbing up against her. As we watched this Matt squeaked to me, “Hey! Hey Ma! Feed me! Hey… Ma! What ya doin’? What’s that? I’m hungry! Ma! Food!” while mom frantically hunted for food and brought it back to her fledglings. Another time Mark and I heard a fledgling Barred Owl begging for food. Usually Mark is a pretty quiet and serious fellow but he surprised me with his description of the owl beg by making a slow ascending squeak while saying “Feeeeed ME!” It was a fairly accurate representation of their begging call.

During my daily monitoring this week I finally found a Prothonotary nest on my own! It was so exciting and relieving. Who can tell if I was just lucky or if I am getting better at finding and tracking Prothonotary Warblers. For my pride’s sake, let’s just say I am getting better at it. It was a cool find because after following a female carrying a beak full of Spanish moss to the cypress knee cavity, I stood there and got an exquisite view of the same female bringing 4 more loads of Spanish moss to make a nest inside the knee. Then A014, the assumed father-to-be, followed her in and I swear I heard some interesting fluttering, purring caws coming from the little cavity before he flew back out again. I have a guess as to what they were doing in there but I’ll let you take your own guess.

Another significant event this week was a staff meeting I sat in on. Everyone was there making decisions, brainstorming, and updating each other on the month’s happenings and upcoming ventures. I didn’t have a lot to add to the conversations other than my update on the work I’m doing here, but it was extremely interesting to hear these people make decisions together. It reminded me a whole lot about studying at Cornell because it was completely interdisciplinary. Professors and other faculty at Cornell often impress on students that a successful student and person is someone who can pull thoughts and ideas from different disciplines to solve problems. During this meeting it was impressive how geology, geography, hydrology, property economics, human relations, and of course ecology and conservation biology were all wrapped up together to create solutions. Because Audubon South Carolina owns so much land and strives to expand and protect more bottomland hardwood forest swamp, they need to think about all of these things to manage it. I’m glad I was able to sit in on this meeting because I took away a valuable lesson that I will bring with me back to Cornell. I’ve always known this in a way, but I’ll try to consciously recognize opportunities to think interdisciplinarily when looking for solutions at Cornell and beyond.