BIRD BANDING RESULTS FOR

HILTON POND NORTH DURING CURRENT PERIOD

16-31 October 2025

The table below shows birds banded during the Current Period (Columns 1 & 2), each species' Yearly Tally (Column 3), and a Grand Total for each species (Column 4) since banding began at Hilton Pond North in March 2024. Any new species for the current year are in RED.

NEWLY BANDED BIRDS

AT HILTON POND NORTH

16-31 October 2025

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

More remarkable that this year's 171 new bandings, we recaptured 34 of last year's 154 hummers, the first being a Second Year male (SY, above) banded 24 July 2024 as a recent fledgling and re-trapped on 19 April 2025. Our 34 returns was a overall rate of 22% RTHU from 2024, quite significant when we note that during 41 years at our former study site in York SC we averaged a 12% ruby-throat return rate.

The two pie charts above compare capture rates for the just finished year (2025, at left) and 2024, based on age and sex. (HY = Hatch Year, or immature; AHY is After Hatch Year, an adult hatched at least the year before.) HY males were the dominant class both years, making up ~40% of all captures, with AHY males being the smallest class at ~12%. Adult females outnumbered male counterparts roughy 2:1, which correlates with a breeding strategy among Ruby-throated Hummingbirds in which males have a "harem system" and may mate with more than one female.

Young birds outnumbered adults by a significant margin  both years, making up ~70% of our newly banded population. This would be expected since a female ruby-throat typically lays two eggs in a nest and may double brood in North Carolina. (We should point out some adult hummers banded here in spring or fall could be pass-through migrants and NOT part of the local breeding population. Some Autumn Hatch Year birds might also have been migrants.)

Banding Ruby-throated Hummingbirds provides us with useful information that helps us understand and even protect the species. The most basic info is described in the preceding paragraphs and charts: We now know more about the number of individuals in a population, their ages, and their genders—at least at Hilton Pond North in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Collecting these data over consecutive years can reveal whether the RTHU population is increasing or in decline, the latter a possible red flag that causes us to take a closer look at causes. As noted, our local data can also be compared with our previous long-term study in York SC—and with data collected by other RTHU banders across the eastern U.S. and Canada.

Perhaps more important than basic data mentioned above is what we learn if a Ruby-throated Hummingbird returns years later to our banding site. It's always fulfilling to recapture a RTHU from a previous year, knowing it has left us, flown to some far-off Neotropical country, and returned to the very same spot where it was banded. This is one of the great wonderments of nature, that a bird the size of your thumb makes a lengthy two-way migratory trip, sometimes for multiple years in a row! Unless someone recaptures our banded hummer on then other end, we can only speculate where it's actually been, but each later-year return does offer important knowledge about longevity and site fidelity.

As shown in the second chart above, we can also learn about return rates based on age and gender. Of 34 RTHU returning here in 2025 after being banded locally the year before, a significant majority were the 24 females (70%): Ten banded last year as Hatch Year birds, plus 14 as After Second Year (ASY) adults that had to have hatched at least in 2023. (Note that all ASY hummers banded in 2025 had to be at least three years old.) Only two "older" ASY males returned this year, plus eight Second Year males.

In general, we might have expected our higher 2025 return rate for younger hummers since last year we banded significantly more immature ruby-throats than adults. (Hatch Year male, above, showing his first two red gorget feathers.)

Over all, we're pleased to have banded 325 total Ruby-throated Hummingbirds in 2024 and 2025, and this year to recapture 34 from the preceding banding season. (We're still amazed after moving to a brand new study site in the heavily forested Blue Ridge Mountains we've had such early success at attracting and banding hummingbirds.)

With only two years' worth of data in the books, it's too early to start drawing conclusions—except to say results so far are in many ways quite similar to what we saw during 41 years of RTHU study in York SC. The age and sex ratios among newly banded hummingbirds at both sites were close, and the only big difference was the higher percentage of hummers returning the next year here at Hilton Pond North. Can’t wait for next spring to see what 2026 will bring!

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

On a stroll this week along the highest ridge line at Hilton Pond North we encountered an ancient Red Maple with a large fungal growth on its trunk. We recognized it as Ganoderma applanatum (above), commonly known as Artist's Conk. This wood-decaying "shelf" or "bracket" fungus is found throughout temperate forests of North America, Europe, and Asia. It's saprophytic and may also be weakly parasitic, causing white rot in both dead and living hardwoods by slowly breaking down woody fibers, converting the tree's lignin and cellulose into its own woody shelf-like structures. These are perennial fruiting bodies that persist for years, adding a new layer of ventral pore tissue each growing season and creating a distinctive banded or ridged appearance on the shelf's top surface. Tough, woody conks serve as important ecological architects in forest ecosystems, recycling nutrients from dead trees back into soil while providing habitat for insects and other small organisms. G. applanatum reproduction is prodigious—a single large bracket can release billions of rust-brown spores during a single growing season, often making fine dust coatings on nearby surfaces.

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

Incidentally, the origin of the word "conk" is unclear but may refer to an imagined similarity in appearance between ridges in both conch shells and the fungus. Humans have used Artist's Conk in various ways, from campfire tinder to the artistic medium suggested by its common name: The white pore surface readily bruises brown when scratched, allowing for detailed etchings that indoors can last for decades. (Original rendering above.)

Ohio friends Kim Pierce Lascola and Amy Girten made their quarterly visit to Hilton Pond North this week, bringing with them an assortment of native flora to enhance our native plant garden. First task was to remove a dwarf Japanese Red Maple whose substantial roots (above) were a challenge to our shovel, pick, and reciprocating saw. This specimen plant had been doing  poorly for several years due to wilt from some species of Verticillium fungus, and we determined it could not be saved.

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

Kim and Amy did a lot of digging as they took out the diseased maple and later installed native plants such as Red Beebalm, Purple Coneflower, and Blue Mistflower. On the morning of 27 October—just as they finished up their horticultural work and departed for home in Shawnee Hills OH—clouds rolled in at Hilton Pond North and we finally started getting some much-needed rain. Later that afternoon a flock of 50+ American Robins (AMRO) descended—the most we've seen in two years here—and headed straight for large patches of bare soil where Kim and Amy had placed plants. (NOTE: Robins aren't common on our wooded property; in 20 months we've yet to band one.)

AMRO are expert foragers that hunt for food in lawns and loose soil using keen eyesight and sensitive hearing. We watched as they hopped across our garden area, pausing to tilt heads, visually scanning for movement and listening for subtle sounds of invertebrates just beneath the surface. Several times we saw robins use  yellow bills to pull flexible pink earthworms coming out from the wet and gobble them down before looking for more. A few AMRO also grabbed purple berries on our Japanese Beautyberry shrubs. Incidentally, the American Robin in our photo above is undoubtedly a male, based on his dark head and extensive bright orange breast feathers; females are paler in both regards. We suspect he's also an adult because of overall intensity of plumage coloration from a just-completed annual pre-basic molt into non-breeding plumage.

Downy Woodpeckers (hatch-year female, above) are the smallest North American woodpeckers and among the most widespread and adaptable members of this family (Picidae), thriving in a variety of wooded habitats from suburban parks to mature forests. In upper Ashe County NC these year-round picids are common visitors to forest edges, mixed woodlands, and backyard feeders—particularly when suet is offered. DOWO forage on tree trunks and branches, using short, chisel-like bills to excavate insects, larvae, and eggs from bark crevices; fishhook barbs on their sharply pointed tongues (see photo) grab and pull grubs from feeding holes they've drilled in trees.

Downies also feed on berries and seeds, particularly in winter. Genders are distinguished by a small red patch on the male's nape, lacking on females. (Young males typically have an extensive red crown that disappears.) Downy Woodpeckers are often seen in mixed-species foraging flocks with chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches during the non-breeding season, creating lively activity in mountain woodlands. Their gentle tapping and high-pitched "pik" calls are familiar sounds here at Hilton Pond North where they excavate nesting cavities in dead snags each spring; these provide important nest sites for other cavity-nesting species once the woodpeckers have moved on. We've banded  19 DOWO in two years here, just two so far in 2025.

Weather during the second half of October at Hilton Pond North was not conducive to bird banding; for the birds' sake we chose not to run mist nets on cold or rainy days of which there were many—including two days below freezing. Strong winds during the period likewise made deploying nets unadvisable. (Among other things, windblown nets fill with hundreds of falling autumn leaves, leading to the unpleasant task of our extricating them from the finely woven mesh.) Due in part to such unfavorable meteorological circumstances we ended up with an abysmal banding total of only FIVE birds and FOUR species for the period: Two Yellow-rumped Warblers, a Carolina Chickadee, an American Goldfinch, and a female Downy Woodpecker. By comparison, in the final two weeks of October last year we banded 138 birds of an astounding 24 species, including many goldfinches, yellow-rumps, and Purple Finches. Yes, weather diminished the number of days we could operate nets, but for the most part fall migrants never really appeared for us. What a difference a year makes!

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

And speaking of Beautyberry, robins weren't the only garden visitors that took a liking to the clusters of purple fruit. (Click on video above.) A yearling White-tailed Deer figured out he could strip berries from the shrub, making quite a mess of the stems. It was a young buck, as shown by forehead buttons that reveal where next year's first antlers will appear. This individual has been visiting the garden at Hilton Pond North with his mother since he was a spotted fawn; by late October he appears to be mostly independent of her but too young to join up with other bucks in the neighborhood.

All photos, videos, maps, charts, drawings, and text © Hilton Pond North

Sunset from Hilton Pond North, 31 October 2025. After a near-drought earlier this month, the past week has been super soggy with 3.37" of rain on our ridge. This last day of the month was still cloudy, but a south-facing view (above) was worth sharing. That two-humped peak in the distance at right is Mount Jefferson—about eight air miles away—towering over the twin towns of Jefferson and West Jefferson. From there in winter with a 'scope we might be able see our comfy cabin on the mountain.

Happy Halloween!

BANDED BIRD RECAPTURES/RETURNS

AT HILTON POND NORTH

16-31 October 2025

Tufted Titmouse banded here 09/05/24; now 2nd-year male

Tufted Titmouse banded here 03/28/25; now after-hatch-year female

White-breasted Nuthatch banded here 09/05/24; now after-2nd-year female

White-breasted Nuthatch banded here 10/03/24; now after-hatch-year unknown