Spring 2003

Touching a Bird's Life
By Sheryl De Vore
Photos by Carol Freeman

The magnolia warbler sat limp in my palms, quiet. Eyes closed. Cold. A thousand miles from where it had begun its journey. Caleb Gordon placed the fragile, yellow jewel into his coat, keeping just enough space between him and the bird to allow air to enter the warm haven. It's still alive, he said. It's still alive, I whispered. There is still time to save the birds.

That is the greater lesson we learned last year, when Caleb, a Lake Forest College professor, taught a handful of volunteers, students, and seasoned birders the delicate art of bird banding. For 13 days in May, Caleb set up 12 mist-nets along the Skokie River in hopes of catching migratory birds. Various members of our group gathered most of these days around 5:30 a.m. and remained until about noon to do hourly runs along the mist-nets, retrieve the birds, band and measure them, and record the data. (For the study's scientific findings, see Field Notes.)

Caleb chose the Skokie River Nature Preserve, owned and managed by the Lake Forest Open Lands Association, for the banding project. The preserve serves as one of the first green corridors west of Lake Michigan. As such, it is a magnet for hungry migratory birds — the magnolia, golden-winged, bay-breasted and other warblers; veeries; Swainson's and wood thrushes; empidonax flycatchers; and more — all of which fly hundreds to thousands of miles in spring and fall between their wintering and breeding grounds.

Little is known about migratory green corridors and how they satisfy these songbirds' needs. If we are to know how best to protect these regions, we need data.

Birders, scanning sky, trees, and ground with binoculars, report data. But how often is this information skewed by where we are, what we see, and what we want to see? Banding may give us a better or, at the least, an expanded picture of population trends of birds. Past bird-banding studies, for example, helped determine that the Arctic tern makes the longest migration flight of any living species — an annual round trip of 25,000 miles. Considering that fact, one might rethink the human tendency to view small birds as helpless babes in conservationists' arms. If a bird can fly that far, reproduce successfully, and make the round trip home, there is hope.

But consider that, according to the National Breeding Bird Survey, at least 100 of the more than 250 species of migratory songbirds are declining in numbers. Habitat destruction on their wintering, breeding, and migratory grounds is one of the main causes. How can we not be afraid for these birds?

No fear, however, is more encompassing, more immediate, than how a birder feels when attempting to retrieve her first bird out of a net. To be truthful, I had never thought I could handle birds properly — I would break their bones, squeeze their necks, drop them, or even step on them. "The first time I went to retrieve a bird from the net," Lake Forest Open Lands' Marion Cartwright told me, "I wanted to run away and crawl into a hole." And yet in several days she was deftly separating flimsy legs and tiny feathers from tangled webs.

And so, with the brain signaling the need for calm against a trembling, fearful heart, I approach the mist-net to retrieve my first bird. I tentatively touch a white-throated sparrow's tiny, thin, slightly fleshy, bony legs. I grip them softly, then more tightly to keep the joints from dislocating, as Caleb had demonstrated earlier, yet I'm still frightened I will squeeze too hard.

I pull the bird away from the net, and it is free.

I place the sparrow into the canvas bag, pulling the white string around the top tightly enough to keep the bird from escaping, but loosely enough to allow air to enter. No time, however, to ponder the experience. Other birds must be retrieved from the mist-nets, and only when we are all back at the banding table can we unearth our gems.

And then, after years and years of watching birds from afar, I actually hold one, feel its soft, murmuring body flush against my palm.

I couldn't ignore the fact that one individual bird may suffer for the good of the whole — and that I was now personally contributing to its suffering. The bewildering moment of hitting the net, followed by a brief immobilization on a brisk and windy morning, stresses the birds considerably. Then they wait in their bags to be pawed and prodded by humans, who blow on their feathers to check for fat deposits, measure and examine their wings, slide their tiny bodies into black nylons to be dangled from a scale, grasp them again with the bander's grip, secure a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service band around one thin leg, and then finally let them fly back into their own environment.

The thought of all that actually inspires the beginning bander to work with the patience and necessary expedition of a scientist. After all, the better and more quickly we work, the better for the birds.

Still, each time I went with a group to check one of the mist-nets, fear rose in me again as I thought about taking another stressed bird out of the net. Retrieving a magnolia warbler was not the "piece of cake" I had experienced with the white-throated sparrow. The warbler's tongue was out of its mouth and caught in the net. Its feet and head were considerably tangled. A more experienced bander helped me release the warbler, but neither of us could get its tongue back in its mouth. The bird went into the bag to await Caleb's skillful hands.

When we pulled the warbler from the bag, its tongue was still out of its mouth. I watched, trembling, as Caleb finally got the tongue back in. The warbler was not doing well. Its eyes were closed. It seemed still and lifeless, even though its body was slightly trembling.

Caleb placed the warbler inside his jacket and let it warm for a few minutes. The wait was agonizing. If the magnolia warbler could warm up enough to grasp firmly onto a branch, Caleb told me, it would be fine.

He set the bird on a small branch near the ground.

It teetered. I shuddered.

It stumbled to the ground.

And then, in a burst of energy, this one-ounce yellow bird, with bold dark streaking on its flanks and a magnificent blue-black back, flew. I felt as if I could almost fly.

On another day, two different veeries, soft chocolate brown all over, got their legs broken, perhaps when getting tangled into the net. Caleb had to secure a makeshift splint on the leg before sending the birds back into the wild. It is not easy watching this, not easy to convince oneself that banding will help the birds.

But comfort comes from the fact that only 7 of the 991 captured birds perished, and that someone like me could actually retrieve a bird from the net, process it, and successfully release it back into the wild unscathed.

The moment I held a wild bird, all birds ceased to be the distant jewels once accessible only by the feigned closeness of binoculars.

When a gray catbird gathered cedar mulch in my backyard to build its nest the other day, I imagined my index and middle fingers holding its head just the right way in the bander's grip, like a mother who instinctively knows how to hold a baby's head upright. Even though the bird was not near enough for me to touch it, I could still feel the soft, delicate, soothing feathers. I sensed myself stroking the black cap of the head and talking to it.

I realized at that moment that I am not so afraid to get close to a bird now, and not quite as afraid that we will lose them.