I’m quite behind in my bycatch* posts! All of the birds in this post were caught several trips ago.
*Bycatch: birds that fly into our nets while we are trying to catch juncos. We extract them from the net, take a few photos, and release them.
Female Brewer’s Blackbird:
I am too zen to be bothered by you, giant pink monster
Actually, not
I’m getting behind on my bycatch posts! These birds were all accidentally caught on the last trip, not the current one.
Mountain Chickadee:
I’m so angry at you that my wing and my tail are becoming one! This is my superpower!
Charles with a female White-crowned Sparrow
When you’re target netting, as we are, you use just a few nets and play the song of the bird species you want to catch to lure them into the nets. Even so, sometimes you accidentally catch other things.
The bycatch we dreaded was the stinging insects: we caught two bees and three wasps last week. We did get all of them freed, but it was very time-consuming, and was more time spent closer to these stinging guys than I really ever wanted. Lots of disentangling one body part and then flinching back, disentangling another and flinching back…
It’s hard not to like avian bycatch, though. We extract them from nets and simply release them—I don’t have a permit to do anything with any species besides juncos—but still it’s fun to handle other bird species, and to see them up close. Continue reading
Tough Little Birds 