Le Conte's Sparrow recovery, Chippewa County, 7-9

[Brian Johnson]

On Monday, July 9, Lena Usyk and I took a road trip
from our study area near Pickford to survey grassland
birds in the Rudyard  area. We stopped to photograph
an unusually cooperative Le Conte’s Sparrow at the
corner of Dryburg and Teets Roads. To our surprise, we
saw the bird was banded on the right leg. Knowing that
we are the only banders working with this species in
Michigan, we thought this bird could be one of ours.
Since we band sparrows on the right leg during
odd-numbered years and almost all of our Le Conte’s
from this year (55 banded so far) were sitll on siite,
we further thought it could be an old bird.
 
We were very curious as to the identity of this
individual, so we retrieved our banding and netting
gear from our cabin in Cedarville and returned later
in the day. We netted three Le Conte’s Sparrows at the
same spot before we caught our target bird. Indeed, it
was one of my own bands. Lena and I had originally
caught him as a juvenile on August 5, 2003 at
Munuscong, 17.5 miles to the east.

This was one of the very neatest events in my whole
banding career. Besides incrementally adding to our
collective knowledge of the species, it was only the
second-ever foreign recovery for Le Conte’s Sparrow,
and it set a new longevity record (4 years, 2 months).

Brian



       
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