I've teamed up with Jenny Phillips from Tulane University to begin color banding San Francisco Nuttall's white-crowned sparrows. Jenny's working on a song-related project as well but hers involves studying the effects of anthropogenic (human-derived) noise on NWCS song production and transmission.
We started at Lake Merced - right next to San Francisco State University.
We were target netting with male songs that Jenny had recorded previously. Responses were strong but the birds didn't always fly into the nets. Sometimes they perched frustratingly close and just sung back in response. However, we did catch a few individuals.
Jenny (right) and her field assistant Kathleen setting up a net.
A local conservation organization, Point Blue Conservation Science, generated color band codes for us to affix to the white-crowns. The codes are read from left leg to right leg and from body to foot. So this bird would get a color code of S/YOB (silver for the USGS band on his left leg, then Yellow, Orange, Blue for the three on his right):
That way when we go back to Lake Merced for follow up research we know we are working with individual "S/YOB"
After banding we took some standard measurements such as age, weight, feather wear, and bill measurements. These last measurements are especially important because the shape and size of a bill can affect a song - much like how our mouths affect how different sounds are produced in human language. We also took blood samples for my parasite study.
Kathleen with one of the Lake Merced Nuttall's white-crowned sparrows.
Turns out there's other wildlife at Lake Merced as well:
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