44 THEAUDUBONBULLETIN 



Notes from Waukegan Bird Banding Station 



The most noticeable event of the winter season was the be- 

 havior of our Regular Boarder, a Fox Sparrow, who came to 

 our yard on November 12 and came back again on November 

 13, 14, 15 and 16. Then he was trapped twice and sometimes 

 three times a day until his total was thirty-three at the end of 

 the month, and still he stayed on, making a total of fifty-nine 

 visits in December. During the last of January he skipped a 

 few days but still held his attendance record up to forty-two 

 times. February was warm and he got the spring fever and 

 only came when the snow was on the ground or on stormy days. 

 He made only thirteen visits for the month. In all his times of 

 being trapped and released to March first totaled 149, but this 

 does not count the times that he got his meals from the flat traps 

 when no one was around to pull the string and catch him. We 

 think he must have the record for the most trapped bird in the 

 United States. 



Tree Sparrows visited our traps- during the past winter sea- 

 son for the first time. The two preceding years the traps 

 were in the same places but for some reason failed to attract 

 them, or they were not in the district to be caught. 



Chickadees also made their first visit in numbers. Last year 

 we trapped just one, but this year we trapped twenty-eight, 

 mostly in November. These repeated right along through the 

 winter, so the trapping and banding proved that they remained 

 in one place for the winter. 



Early last fall we observed a Nuthatch taking grain from 

 under one of the traps and storing it under the bark of trees, 

 just anywhere it found a place, but a few days later another 

 was observed taking the grain and storing it in a knot hole. It 

 made three trips. Then we pulled the string and trapped it, 

 but a few days later we saw it again storing the grain in the 

 same knot hole. We let it make twelve trips before it was 

 trapped. On three more days the same bird made eight, ten and 

 four trips to the same hole before we trapped it to read the num- 

 ber and release as before, so we are sure that it was the same 

 bird and it was really storing grain in the same place every time. 



During the mild weather there seemed to be hardly any birds 

 around, but just as soon as a storm came they would be back to 

 feed at the traps, so most of the trapping went by jumps. This 

 applied to Juncos especially, but we were pleased by having two 

 Juncos return with the old bands and one was back for the third 

 time. 



A Downy Woodpecker trapped and banded a year ago returned 

 and was trapped again. Another Downy that was trapped and 

 banded last year was found dead at the high school. We were 

 successful in banding about a dozen more Downies. 



W. I. Lyon. 



