Whenever luck is involved in a human endeavor, superstition finds ways to creep in.
I'm generally not a superstitious person, except for when I'm banding. There is a fair amount of skill involved, but there's also a strong element of luck - especially of the right weather/right place/right time kind. We can have 80 years of collective experience in a blind, but if the hawks aren't flying, we aren't catching them.
So, yeah, I have a superstition related to banding. However, it's an eminently practical one: chocolate, specifically really good dark chocolate.
You see, chocolate brings chocolate-eyed birds. And chocolate-eyed birds include a lot of really cool raptors. Falcons, for one - peregrines, prairies, merlins and, of course, kestrels. Look at this nice chocolate eye. It's obviously some good luck to be gazing upon this face.
I had the opportunity to do some off-season banding up in Solano County. During the fall banding season, hawks had been few and far between for the most part (though there were some memorable exceptions), so I jumped at the chance. Our first two captures were male kestrels, and they were great birds. The first one, the bird in the intro, was a nice, hefty 120 grams (the males we see in the fall are typically in the 100-120 g range). The second bird (above) weighed in at a whopping 130g, and had another treat for us as well.
Male kestrel tails are usually mostly rusty red-orange with a wide black band at the end and a white tip; the outer tail feather usually has some black-and-white barring. Here's a good example. There is a bit of variability to the patterns, and some are quite different than the norm - this was getting toward the extreme end of the spectrum. Very exciting for a plumage geek.
Another chocolate-eyed bird is adult redtail. Juveniles have pale yellow eyes, which gradually darken to brown as they age. (I talked about that a little when I wrote about redtails in December.) By molt pattern, we were able to figure out that this bird had been hatched in 2010; its eye was dark, but it will still darken more as it ages. There's a lot of individual variation in the pace of darkening, so it's not useful for specifically aging redtails; the eye color can also look different due to lighting, head angle, etc. The same bird's milk chocolate eyes look like semi-sweet below:
Some of the birds just go full chocolate. This bird was the highlight of the day for me - a gorgeous adult dark morph redtail. Compare the breast color of the bird above with this one:
Roughly 5% of redtails are rufous or dark morph birds; for some reason the percentage is a on the higher end in the central valleys of California (it's very rare on the east coast, by contrast). The great variation in redtail coloration is what made me into a plumage geek in the first place, and this bird was just a stunning example of a dark bird. She was also an older bird, making her a double-bonus since I'm a molt geek, too.
Returning to an earlier theme, she also had a really interesting tail. Western redtails often show some black barring all the way up the tail, but her tail had all sorts of rich colors and elegant patterning. A really memorable bird... we had some very lucky chocolate yesterday.
We ended the day with a really memorable sighting as dusk approached. We rounded the corner on one of the back roads and saw a bird on a fence post - another hawk? No, this time it was a short-eared owl. It was very co-operative and let us get great looks. I only carry a point and shoot camera when banding, but that was still good enough to grab this one last memory of a lovely day.