Returning Dark-eyed Junco!

Dark-eyed Junco

This week we were lucky enough to recapture a Junco from last year. This bird, an adult female, was captured last August as a juvenile. At that time she still looked like a baby bird with fluffy, streaky plumage, so we weren’t able to determine the sex. This year, though, it was obvious! Her brown-tinged gray feathers and small wing gave her away. 

Dark-eyed Juncos (Junco hyemalis) come in a variety of subspecies with very distinctive plumages. The subspecies we find in Fairbanks is the Slate-colored Junco (J. h. hyemalis). While several subspecies of Junco are found in the Western U.S., Slate-coloreds spend their winter in the Midwest and Southeast. That means our little Junco probably flew east over the boreal forest last fall, and then south to spend the winter—and THEN she flew all the way back up here. Pretty impressive!

Today, banding was slow and steady, catching a few birds at a time throughout the morning.

~Laura