Bird Watching: I Found a Banded Hummingbird!, 1 by ducbucln

ducbucln wrote:
It took exactly 9 days after I'd pieced together the full band number and several emails to all the banding networks, the USGS and the Univ of Calif at Davis to finally locate the proper banding station that had banded this hummer.

To my delight it turned out that this male Anna's hummingbird had been banded on Sept. 6, 2009 at the McLaughlin Reserve, Lower Lake, CA. and "I" was one of the team of four people that actually banded this hummer. I also found out that this hummingbird was only captured once during the banding sessions that occurred once a month over that year and that happened to be the last year any birds were banded due to loss of funding.

At least I know this little guy flew 23 miles through the mountains to my home sometime during his migration. By the way, he's still here and I hope to see him in the coming years.