Spring 2000 Table of Contents

Willow flycatchers keep coming back

When Willow flycatchers find a place to summer and raise a family, they keep coming back.

That’s just one thing that WDFW urban biologist Howard Ferguson and his volunteers are finding as they prepare to start the fifth year of a bird study in the Spokane area. The Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS ) study catches birds during the breeding season in fine “mist” nets strung between poles and placed in the same spots year after year. The caught birds are leg-banded, measured, and weighed, then released. Changes and patterns in the number of young produced and the survivorship of adults and young are tracked.

MAPS is a continent-wide program with nearly 500 standardized bird-netting and banding stations throughout the U.S.and Canada. Since 1996, WDFW has been running two of these stations near Spokane, one in a rich riparian community in the Little Spokane River State Park Natural Area, and another one on the southwest slope of Mt. Spokane State Park.

So far, the Spokane MAPS volunteers have recorded that four Willow flycatchers have returned to the Little Spokane River site each of the four years of the study. One was captured three times, two were captured four times, and one bird was captured seven times — and all in the very same net!

One Yellow warbler was also captured twice in two different nets over the four year period, and one Gray Catbird was captured three times in the same net.

Here’s a summary of all the results to date:

Previous section

Next section