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

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

As anticipated, we almost immediately received a digital Certificate of Appreciation (above) revealing the Purple Finch was banded 08 August 2024 in Hilliardton, Ontario, Canada—780 straight-line miles almost due north of us. The supervising bander, Bruce Murphy, reported the PUFI was of unknown sex and hatched in 2023 or earlier, making it now an after-third-year bird. Since it was brown, we know for sure it's a female; a male of this age would have raspberry-red plumage. (Young male PUFI are brown like females.) This Purple Finch undoubtedly was captured originally on or near its breeding grounds and may have made a roundtrip migration a couple of times.

In follow-up correspondence we learned from Bruce the PUFI was banded at Hilliardton Marsh Research & Education Centre, where he is Coordinator of Research and Education. Bruce told us this is the furtherest foreign encounter of a Purple Finch banded at the Centre, where they handle more than 300 per year.

According to its Web site, the Centre "is a non-profit organization that provides opportunities for school groups and the general public to learn about birds and wetlands. We facilitate and conduct research about the marsh, birds, and wildlife that make it their home. The 1,800-acre provincially significant Hilliardton Marsh Provincial Wildlife Area [is] home to over 600 species of waterfowl, songbirds, mammals, fish, and plant life. Hilliardton Marsh was constructed by Ducks Unlimited in 1996 and it has been a site for migration monitoring since then. Prior to restoration of the marsh the area had lost 85% of its original wetland habitat and the landscape was dry and provided virtually no habitat for waterfowl or other wetland dwelling species." Each year the Centre bands thousands of birds of many species, particularly during spring and fall migration.

In the old days we would submit foreign recapture info via snail mail to the federal Bird Banding Lab in Patuxent MD, the repository for banding data for the U.S. and Canada; it would take weeks for a response. Today we simply pull up the reportband.gov Web site—even on our iPhone while we're in the field—then enter the band number and other pertinent info. Typically, within seconds we get feedback about when and where the bird was banded, and by whom.

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

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

Such was the case this week at Hilton Pond North when on 14 January we mist netted a brown Purple Finch (PUFI, top photo) whose band number (3141-35019) was unfamiliar to us (photo just above). In our nearly two years of research here in upper Ashe County NC we've handled more than 3,300 birds; this week's was only our second capture of someone else's banded individual.