Brandon Banding

Today we made our annual pilgrimage out to Brandon to band the chicks at the McKenzie Seeds Building. The resident male, Zeus, is back but we just found out that there is a new female this year and it is noneother than Hurricane who was hatched in the nestbox on the Radisson Hotel in Winnipeg in 2007. Hurricane is the bird that was spotted in Grand Forks visiting their nestsite on the Smiley Face water tower. She only spent one day there (but they still got her photo with band number!) before moving on and now we know where she moved on to! And speaking of "she", we banded her as a him back in 2007. When we pulled the three chicks out of the nestbox that year, there were by measuring their feet, two males and one female. We now know that this female, was not only male in body size but also in feet/leg size whereas her sister Mistral was half her size (should have been up to 1/3 bigger) but had female sized feet/legs. Just proof that you never know everything! Seeing her flying around with her mate, who is pretty average in size for a male in our project, Hurricane is a small female - not much of a size difference in the air between the two adults! Dan had mentionned that she was a small female, but I hadn't realized how small!

So Hurricane and Zeus have four chicks all of whom needed banding so Off we went - Dennis as our photographer, Bob as our bander and me as pincushion. We also had some falcon fans from Winnipeg come out as well as some from the Brandon area. As we worked on the roof of the McKenzie Seeds, our cheering section were able to watch from the roof of the City Centre parking structure - it seems that right at the top of the ramp gives one the best veiw of the nestbox and its precious contents! We had some help from Dan and others from Manitoba Conservation and also from Don of McKenzie Seeds and the banding went very smoothly. In the end, we have three females and one male at this location and given the gender-reassignment that Hurricane has undergone, we made sure to measure all the chicks' feet/legs again - and it looks like at least two of the females are smaller than we are used to. Bob banded the chicks while they attempted to use their very sharp talons to make a lasting impression on my hands and fingers! I do sometimes feel very much like a pincushion with very large, thick, curved needles being jammed into it!

We put two bands on the chicks, one on each leg. One is a coloured band (black for wild-hatched chicks) with white letters and/or digits that allow us to identify the birds at a distance. The other band is a silver aluminium band with an embossed unique 8-9 digit number sequence that is tracked by the federal bird banding office (both in Canada and the US). Since the numbers on the aluminium band are not used for identification at this stage, we affixed some coloured tape to the band to enable volunteer spotters to identify the chicks once they fledge. This is the first time we have done this so we aren't positive that the tape won't get picked off by the chicks as they preen, but this is really the only opportunity we know we are going to have to include something like this, so we added the tape to their aluminum bands so they didn't interfere with being able to also read their coloured band.

After the bands and tape were attached it was time for Dan to brave the ire of the Zeus and Hurricane to replace the chicks in the nestbox. Zeus' aerial attack runs in particular were gravity defying! Dennis was in seventh heaven snapping photos of the adults from the roof and the chicks while we were inside banding.



Zeus Incoming - Photo by Dennis Swayze

Once all the chicks were back safely in the nestbox, we left the rooftop (dragging a still shutter-happy Dennis with us), collected the falcon fans from the parkade and retired to a nearby restaurant for a fun, noisy lunch filled with peregrine and other wildlife stories. All in all a great day banding peregrines in Brandon!

Check out more of Dennis' photos at Photos by Dennis