Category Archives: General

Start of 2015 banding season

It’s almost time to start banding owls again.  I typically start banding during the last week in August.

Today I got the central triangle of nets set up, with the usual hassle of trying to set up nets interleaved on one pole while working alone.  Fortunately I still had three good 9M nets from last year, although I’ll probably have to buy a couple of 12M for the rest of the setup.

The audio lure needed a bit of work as well; the SLA battery should have been put on the charger since last season but it wasn’t, so I had to replace the battery.

I’ve opened the nets up tonight for a trial run.

 

New audio lure for Holiday Beach

Built a new audio lure for the Holiday Beach owl banders a few months ago, after promising them a new one for a couple of years.  It was time to retire the CDs and the portable CD player in favor of something MP3 based.

The new lure consists of cheap parts from eBay and some others salvaged from the junk drawers.  The main components:

  • mp3 player board with remote
  • stereo amplifier board
  • 4x 16650 Lithium batteries
  • Plastic enclosure
  • Deck horn

A few photos of the finished lure:

IMG_1263 IMG_1264 IMG_1265

The sticker on the deckhorn seemed appropriate for this use.

Full moon

While banding no owls last Saturday (Sep 6), I tried taking photos of the full moon instead.
This was taken with the cellphone camera pointed through a spotting scope:

moon