A Bird in the Hand
Colby’s Island Campus is a unique classroom for Audubon birders to learn bird banding and other research techniques
As beautiful, colorful, and delicate as airborne jewels, songbirds are tough, too—many of the species that land in Maine over the spring and summer will fly thousands of miles to get to their winter destinations in Central and South America.
A group of bird lovers got a closer look at both the delicacy and the strength of songbirds during an Audubon bird-banding expedition on Colby’s Island Campus in Muscongus Bay earlier this summer. They carefully cradled the birds while an expert quickly wrapped an aluminum band around their legs so that the songbirds can be identified in the future.
The day was full of special moments, said Sara Morris, director of the Shoals Marine Laboratory and the incoming president of the American Ornithological Society, who helped lead the expedition.
“Some of my favorite things have to do with watching the faces of people when they hear a bird’s heartbeat,” she said. “You can literally see on their faces when they start to hear it, and then this utter amazement and joy when this is actually happening. There’s a moment of connection that is wonderful to see.”
A longtime collaboration
Colby has had a longstanding partnership with the Audubon Seabird Institute, and over the years many students have spent their summers living on remote islands researching puffins and other seabirds. As the College explores opening up the Island Campus for more learning, research, and creative opportunities, officials at both Colby and Audubon are optimistic about finding new areas of collaboration.
Last summer, Audubon experts installed a Motus Wildlife Tracking System tower on Allen Island. The new tower is part of an international research network that uses coordinated, automated radio telemetry to track birds, bats, or insects, and shine a light on the mysteries of bird migration.
The bird-banding outing in June marked the second year in a row that 25 or so adult field ornithology campers from the Hog Island Audubon Camp, on the other side of Muscongus Bay, ventured to Allen Island for that purpose. They were accompanied by Louis Bevier, an ornithologist and longtime research associate at Colby.
“They are the world experts in shorebird restoration and ecology,” Whitney King, the Dr. Frank and Theodora Miselis Professor of Chemistry, said of Audubon. “There are hundreds of people from all over the world that come to Hog Island every summer. And it just seemed like a great opportunity to support the ornithology work that Colby is doing by connecting with this world-class resource.”
A rich history
Scott Weidensaul, an ornithologist and author who helped lead the bird-banding trip, said that Allen Island is special for many reasons, including its history and landscape. Long ago, it was used by the Abenaki, and in 1605 was the first stop of British explorer George Weymouth in his expedition to what is now Maine.
In the second half of the 20th century, Allen and Benner islands, which make up the Island Campus, were purchased by Betsy Wyeth, wife of painter Andrew Wyeth. Betsy Wyeth spent decades shaping the environment and restoring vernacular Maine architecture on them, an effort that inspired some of her husband’s best-known paintings.
In 2022 Colby acquired Allen and Benner from the Up East Foundation and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art with the intention of preserving these extraordinary areas and utilizing them as centers for learning, research, and creative inspiration through the creation of a dynamic island campus.
“I wouldn’t miss Allen Island for the world,” Weidensaul said. “It just hits a whole bunch of sweet spots for me from Wyeth history to colonial American history to ornithology.”
A chance to commune with nature
The Island Campus is squarely in the middle of the Atlantic Flyway, a major north-south migratory route, and the mixed deciduous forest and open fields on Allen Island make it an attractive habitat.
The Audubon group did what they call “targeted mist-netting” to briefly catch male birds in the middle of the breeding season. The nets—imagine your grandmother’s hair net, but 40 feet long and 10 feet high—are super fine and super soft. The ornithologists place an MP3 speaker at the end of the net and play the song of a bird they want to catch.
“The male hears that, comes charging in there, and the next thing you know he’s in the net, going ‘I’ve never seen a spider web this big before,’” Weidensaul said, adding that the ornithologists make it a quick detour for the birds. “We don’t want to take these birds out of their lives any longer than necessary. We don’t want to pull the females away from the nest and pull them away from the babies, but the males have a little bit more flexibility in their schedule.”
They place the bird in a cloth bag and then put the band on its leg. The whole adventure takes 10 minutes, tops, before the bird returns to his previous activities. But for those doing the banding, it can be an indelible memory. They feel the bird’s body heat and hear its rapid heartbeat.
“It’s a communing with nature that is unlike anything else I’ve experienced,” Morris said.
A successful endeavor
This year, they banded seven or eight birds from six species: the American redstart, the common yellowthroat, the song sparrow, the yellow-rumped warbler, the black-throated blue warbler, and the dark-eyed junco. All were marked with a lightweight aluminum alloy leg band, like a little bracelet, etched with a nine-digit serial number unique to that bird. The birds are among several million birds banded in North America each year, with all the identification information entered into a massive database.
“For the better part of 110 or 120 years, that’s how we’ve learned the most about where birds migrate, how long they live, whether they come back to the same place each year, and whether they have the same mates every year,” Weidensaul said.
If the group returns next year, they will set up the nets in the same place in hopes of catching some of the same birds, some of which are so tiny that four of them could be shipped across the country for first-class postage.
“That’s part of why bird migration is so fascinating to so many of us,” Morris said. “In the next month or two, they’ll fly down to Central or South America, where they will spend the winter, and then they will fly back. The likelihood is that they’ll be coming back to the forests on Allen Island.”
