For some reason, lots of junco nestlings and young fledglings really believe they can fly.
Sorry, little guys. You are definitely wrong about this.
BBAR can totally do this.
No?
I can fly!
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Category Archives: DEJU
What we know about one nest
On July 1, 2013, we caught a female junco who we banded MABY.
MABY
An already-banded male, ARKM, seemed very upset about this. Sometimes juncos do hang around when we band their mates—it’s rather sweet to see them reunite when the banded birds are released—but ARKM’s behavior seemed different to me, so after we released MABY, I lurked behind a tree and watched.
Sure enough, ARKM went down to the ground: he had a nest.
ARKM and MABY’s nest, just under the rock.
Field season 2013 moments in photos
I’ve started planning the upcoming field season in a serious way now—deciding on dates, interviewing potential field assistants. It’s made me think a lot about last field season, and about how much I haven’t yet found an opportunity to mention in this blog. So this post is just going to be a selection of memorable things that happened last field season, without any real theme but with lots of photos.
The most beautiful insect I’ve ever seen in person. It looked like a piece of enameled jewelry.
This nest had two chicks in it; when we took them out to band them, we found two unhatched eggs. The lighter one is a junco egg; the dark one is a cowbird egg. These juncos were lucky that the cowbird egg didn’t hatch!
“Ordinary Extraordinary Junco” and the wider world of juncos
ARKM, a male junco from one of my study sites in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Photo by M. LaBarbera
Ah, my noble research junco. Dramatic black hood, peach flanks, rusty back, hopping around the Sierra Nevada mountains and (hopefully) giving me insights into behavior, life history, and adaptation to environmental variability. That’s the story you mostly get from this blog, because it’s the one that I’m most intimately wrapped up in. But it’s a very small piece of the larger world of juncos and junco research.
The Junco Project has produced a series of videos entitled “Ordinary Extraordinary Junco,” all about the wide world of junco research. The videos are wonderful, covering the research in an interesting and accessible way, and filled with great footage of juncos doing every possible thing. If you only have time to watch one, check out Chapter 2: Appalachian Spring, which shows the field methods that I also employ, like nest searching, mist netting, banding, and collecting blood. It’s one thing to see photographs, and quite another to see how these birds look in motion. (As you watch, try to ignore the sound of my so-intense-it’s-audible envy of the resources these junco researchers have—aviaries! eight field assistants! nest cameras! radio-tracking devices!)
Just as my research is one tiny part of junco research overall, my population of juncos is a tiny portion of the juncos that are out there – and many of them are quite different. The juncos in Berkeley, CA, despite being quite far away from the Sierra Nevada juncos and many thousands of feet lower in elevation, look pretty much the same as “my” juncos…
Ghost junco
Isn’t he beautiful? He was caught in the hills in Marin County, not all that far from me, and kept in captivity until he died in 1931.
You might think he’s purely colorless at first glance, but he isn’t. He’s more blue-silver than white, an incredible color to come shining out of a drawer of junco specimens when you’ve just spent the last few weeks measuring the same brown-and-black birds over and over. When you look close you find that hidden in those pale feathers are the whispers of normal junco coloration.
Fun with museum collections (and white-spotted juncos)
Museum collections are a scientific resource. They let researchers refer to a single specimen over and over, or look at variation over an entire continent, or go back and look at change over a century.
They can also be weirdly beautiful.
Winter is there
Banding a nest
It’s rare that I have photos of the process of banding a nest, since usually everyone is holding a chick and we don’t have any extra hands for photographic documentation. For a few nests, however, I was lucky enough to have my father with us, and boy does he like to photograph things! Thanks to him I can show you what it looks like when we band a nest.
EDIT: If you click on these (or any photos on this blog) you can see them bigger.
The nest, tucked next to the clump of plants in the center. If you look closely you can see Mom sitting on it.
Me taking the chicks from the nest, with Kyle ready to catch any runners.
Photo by M. LaBarbera
Often when you approach the nest, the female will flare her tail and spread her wings and run around on the ground to try to draw your attention away from the nest. This is a tail-on view of Mom doing that.
Photo by M. LaBarbera
Mom, angrily chipping at us.
Photo by M. LaBarbera
Small nest? Big babies? No problem!
Nesting moms, are you having trouble fitting all your babies into one nest? Your troubles are over! We’ve got photos to inspire you to fit all those babies into one nest in an elegant, orderly way. A successful breeding season doesn’t have to mean clutter anymore!
These eggs are a mess. Look at that one shoved under the others. Don’t let this be your nest!
Say “aah”
There are a few easy ways for baby juncos to distinguish me from their parents. For example, their parents have feathers and dark heads and are about their size, while I am a gigantic fabric-draped Godzilla monster. However, hungry chicks seem to not always be alert to such nuance, so I’ve accumulated quite a few photographs of the view down the gullets of baby juncos.
SEAL and NORA’s chicks
In the above photo you can see how the bright pink/red of the mouth, surrounded by the yellow bill outline, makes an obvious target for a parent with food.
Mostly, though, I just like how these photos make the chicks look even more like crazy pink alien beings than usual.
INGA’s chicks
Tough Little Birds 
