To catch a catbird
A gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) found itself in the catbird seat May 19 when it was captured and released at the Appledore Island Migration Banding Station – making it the 100,000th bird banded at Appledore.
The station is part of the Cornell- and University of New Hampshire-operated Shoals Marine Lab in the Gulf of Maine, six miles off the coast of Portsmouth, N.H., where thousands of migrating songbirds stop over each year. The resting spot is an ideal location for researchers to study the migration and stopover ecology of neoarctic-neotropical migrants.
More than 131 species have been banded at Appledore since 1981. On one notable day in May 1985, nearly 600 birds were captured and released.
Many birds banded on Appeldore have been sighted far afield. One northern waterthrush, for example, was banded on Appledore in August 1992 and caught again by a bird-bander in Venezuela in October 1994.