Netting for crossbills

Last Wednesday we were netting all day. It's crazy to call this "work"... we just set up the net, right near our tempting "decoy" crossbills (four live, captive crossbills who have an uncanny ability to draw wild crossbills closer)... and we wait. And we wait, and we wait, and we wait. At first in the cool of early dawn, and then in the warming morning, and finally in the blazing heat of mid-day, we wait.

We continually catch other birds who blunder into the net accidentally. We must have caught the same chipping sparrow about ten times - they've got a nest near there - plus I think we had repeated catches of the resident juncos too.


Each bird species has its own "personality" when netted, its own particular way of tangling itself up and its own particular blend of anger, resignation or panic. I'm always impressed by the bravery shown by these little birds against the gigantic two-legged predators that have managed to catch them, and the extent to which they seem angry rather than afraid. We caught a chickadee - they're famed for their pint-size fury when netted, and inevitably they start ripping at your cuticles, unerringly picking the one spot where they can actually inflict some pain. I untangled a green-tailed towhee - a marvelous bird, the first of its kind I'd ever netted. It stunned me with its strength and rage. It was like holding a Molotov cocktail with a bare hand. I could not believe the strength of its kicking! WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM! with its little head feathers pointing straight up in fury and its bright eye glaring at me.

A few minutes later we caught a vesper sparrow that just hung calmly in the net as if saying "Oh well, no point struggling, guess I'm done for."

Those poor little chippies get terrifically tangled in the net - their wings are just the right size so that they can get their entire head stuck through 1 square of the net, and both wings completely through adjacent squares, and then they have a habit of grabbing everything with their feet and spinning around a few times. Yikes. Usually I can pop a bird unharmed out of a net in under two minutes (mist nets don't hurt birds at all - you just have to untangle them and they are perfectly fine). But we had one chippie who was so balled up, and had twisted so many times, that it took both Jamie and I, all four hands, for ten minutes, to get him free.

The hours whiled away, a chipping sparrow here, a junco there. Jamie sat in her camp chair playing beautiful songs on her guitar. I dozed in the back of my Forester, where I'd set up a cozy nest with a couple of pillows, and ready trashy science fiction novels, ate a ridiculous amount of Triscuits and finally fell asleep for a couple hours. This is work??

But no crossbills... yet....