2013 Painted Bunting Report for Birds Banded at the Hummer House Recent History

More than ten years ago while working with the original group of banders at the Hummer House Ranch, I became aware of the vast numbers of Painted Buntings that were present on the ranch during the breeding season. The owner of the ranch, Dan Brown, has engaged in an active cowbird control program for many years and large numbers of Brown-headed Cowbirds have been removed from the ranch each season. In unprotected areas, cowbird nest predation is an important factor in the number of hatch year birds fledged each year for this species. The species seems to be in decline throughout much of its range. Perhaps this is due to the decline of suitable habitat caused by human development or other factors but cowbird predation could be a factor in this decline. Regardless of cause, this decline of Painted Buntings has not occurred at the Hummer House habitat. By the end of the 2007 season, more than 2500 Painted Buntings had been banded at the Hummer House. Virtually all efforts up to that time were concentrated on the feeding areas around the headquarters area where it was possible to band as many as a hundred individuals per day once the hatching year birds had fledged. Painted Buntings were also banded from the Myers Spring location north of the headquarters and other locations across the ranch but no attempt was made to note those birds or estimate numbers from separate locations. Although banding data was available for more than ten seasons prior to that time, there was little to be learned from the hundreds of birds listed. Recapture data was incomplete and no measurements or field notes were taken before 2008. An inspection of those records raised questions about the accuracy of the records themselves. Some Painted Buntings that were credited to the Hummer House were actually banded as other species and at other locations according to records obtained from the Bird Banding Laboratory. Most adult birds were aged as AHY birds. This designation is of little use in confirming the age or sex of a returning bird. Their efforts remained random as to the amount of time and effort given to banding in any season. After all the effort expended on 1

Painted Buntings over the years, is was still a mystery as to the actual number of birds on the ranch and certainly there was no information about populations residing at locations other than the feeding grounds. Not a single nest was ever identified so that cowbird predation or lack thereof could be noted. In 2008, we started banding Painted Buntings at locations away from the headquarters and recording the banding locations in our field notes. We banded at the headquarters and in the two areas that are now known as the East Windmill Banding station (EWA) and the Myers Spring Area (SPR). We also created a new data base that included all of our banding and recapture data for Painted Buntings on the ranch. As time permitted, we increased banding efforts for this species and finished the season with a all-time record 711 individuals banded. In 2009, we standardized our efforts at the Myers Spring area to create the (SPR) banding station. That station was operated on a systematic basis throughout the breeding and migration seasons. Our group banded a large percentage of the Painted Buntings during 2009. Efforts by the original banding group were still conducted and recorded as they had been for many seasons and efforts to standardize records were unsuccessful. During 2010, we continued to operate much as we had for the past 2008-2009 season. We did however emphasize the banding and recapture of Painted Buntings in the late summer of 2010 in an attempt to understand the number of birds still present from the breeding population as opposed to the number of birds migrating across the ranch to the wintering grounds during that portion of the year. Our first attempts were also made to assemble the data available that would indicate the movement of individuals between the various locations were Painted Buntings were banded. A fundamental change occurred at the start of 2011 when our group became the only banding group conducting regular research on the ranch. This change allowed for the standardization of all banding data collected from Painted Buntings as well as the other research being conducted there. That change also allowed us the freedom to survey and establish the South Concho River (SCR-1) MAPS station at a third location on the ranch. This station is operated under the protocols of the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivability program of the Institute of Bird Populations. This was the third of our established station areas 2

where Painted Buntings are banded on a systematic basis throughout the time they are present on the ranch. This year also brought the worst of the historic drought that has plagued our area for some time. We encountered smaller but steady numbers of Painted Buntings at one station site throughout the early part of the 2011 season. We encountered returns and new birds at this site. However, a good percentage of these early birds could have been migrants passing through area. In early May, the South Concho River MAPS Station opened for the breeding season. As expected, Painted Buntings were the most common species encountered there throughout the breeding season. Older males and females represented most of those encountered at all of our station locations. Second year and older males represented a disproportionate number of those that continued to frequent the cowbird traps and the feeding grounds at the headquarters. Breeding success for Painted Buntings at any of our station areas was limited at best for the 2011 breeding season. We located multiple nests with eggs and or nestlings during the breeding season near two banding stations but the number of hatching year birds banded was less than 10% of the number banded during late June and early July of 2010. At least some adult females were in heavy brood through early July but probably were unsuccessful in any late nesting attempts. At the end of the third week of July, a large percentage of the Painted Buntings residing on the ranch departed in a very short period of time. Our MAPS location failed to produce one Painted Bunting in the banding effort immediately following this exodus. The few Painted Buntings banded after this date were all adult birds and probably represented migrating birds that were simply passing through our banding stations. The drought and lack of resources was surely the cause of such an abrupt departure. For the past several years, Painted Buntings have produced a large number of offspring by the third week of June and adult birds often attempted a second clutch of nestlings. Once nesting is completed and the hatching year birds fledged, adults begin to depart in small waves that extend over the greater part of a month. Under those circumstances, if banding continues to be systematic, adults 3

and hatching year birds are normally banded until the middle of September. Unless careful consideration is given to recapture data, it is difficult to determine if and when the resident breeders and their offspring depart. Departing birds are replaced by similar waves of migrating birds until August when hatching year birds began to dominate the banding numbers. Even among hatching year birds, it is never easy to determine the number of resident offspring remaining without careful study of recapture data. Eventually all the hatching year birds present are migrants that dwindle in numbers until the last birds of the fall. A few late migrating adult males seem to come through with the last of the migrant hatching year birds. We do however continue to record two or three returns during the last weeks of the season. There is reason to believe that these are birds that were first banded as north bound migrants in earlier years that are recaptured as they return from areas north of our site. The 2012 banding season saw a return to more normal weather conditions. Winter and spring rains resulted in good development of most forbs and grasses. We had our normal return of adults during the early banding season and the 2012 breeding season resulted in good numbers of hatching year birds in the late summer and fall. We believed that we had a sufficient number of hatching year birds for a more normal return sampling in 2013. We finished 2012 with only 12 second year birds recovered from the banding year of 2011 when breeding success was at a historic low. Current Season

In 2013, we finished the development of the East Windmill Area (EWA) as a banding station. We had used this area as a banding site for some time but had not standardized the net locations within the area. This area became more significant when we located fifteen Painted Bunting nests in close proximity to the net locations. We were able to inspect these nests for cowbird predation and once hatching occurred, we were able to note the development of nestlings. In May of 2103, the long time owner of the Myers Spring area ended the Hummer House lease of that property and announced plans to sell that land to the highest bidder. Since we did not have authorized access to that area, we stopped using 4

that banding station. The loss of this station will doubtless alter much of our Painted Bunting Data for 2013 and beyond. Not only will we not sample that population, we will not be able to record returning birds to that station area. We made several efforts during breeding season to locate another site suitable for a new banding station. In summer of 2013, we visited the ranch with Dr. Kathleen Lynch a Neurobiologist from Hofstra University in New York State that is studying the neurology of cowbirds as well the stimuli that cause the female to develop a mature egg follicle in a timely manner to use in a discovered nest. Dr. Lynch is interested in bringing some of her graduate students to the ranch to help with making larger counts of nests to determine cowbird predation on the ranch. We made plans for preliminary efforts in the summer of 2014. Painted Bunting Recapture Totals With the close of banding in 2013, we have recorded 6033 Painted Buntings on the ranch with 641 of those banded this year. We have accumulated five years of data from the banding and recaptures that were compiled from the efforts of our banding team. We have an additional five years of recapture data that are the results from our banding team plus some data from the original banding team. We have verified and checked records from these five years and feel comfortable that these records are true records of banding recaptures taking place on the ranch. Within the past five years, we have records for the returns of 487 individuals and we have 237 records of individuals that were returns for the 5 years previous to that time. On the 487 individuals that were returns during these past five seasons, 184 have been recorded in three or more of the past five years. Four of these records exceed the longevity record for Painted Buntings prior 2011 when we first sorted records and discovered two individuals that exceeded the national record. We will investigate further the twelve year old bird that we uncovered from the records that we used to make this report. I have no doubt that this bird represents another national longevity record for the species.

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Age at Return

2008-2013

1998-2007

Multiple

Years

Total

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

51 98 124 91 53 27 23 7 4 1 2 1 487

46 61 47 33 20 13 10 1 3 2 1 0 237

0 5 32 57 30 23 19 5 6 3 3 1 184

0 3 4 5 5 6 7 6 6 7 6 6

102 159 171 124 73 40 33 8 7 3 3 1 724

Encounters by Banding Year If we consider the cumulative totals for returning birds from each of the past 10 seasons, we find that the 711 birds banded in 2008 have resulted in 154 returns in the five seasons since those birds were banded. This is 21% of the birds actually banded in 2008. The average number of returns from each of the ten banding seasons is 62 per year. The lowest number of cumulative returns for any of the 10 seasons was the drought year of 2011. We have only recorded 30 returns or 6% of the total birds banded from that season. The 2012 season does not have as many returning birds as might be expected. Since a larger percentage of the birds in 2012 were banded at the SPR banding station and we were unable to access that site during the breeding season of 2013, virtually none of those were recorded as returns. The 2003 season has had individuals from that season recaptured in each of the subsequent seasons since that time

Year 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

Total Returns 44 44 74 67 32

% Returns 13 14 27 16 21

First Yr Returns 30 12 30 6 20

Yrs Encountered 2004-2013 (10) 2005-2013 (9) 2006-2013 (8) 2007-2011 (5) 2008-2013 (6) 6

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Total

154 56 85 30 32 618

21 10 13 6 6 14

112 38 44 15 32 339

2009-2013 (5) 2010-2013 (4) 2011-2013 (3) 2012-2013 (2) 2013 (1)

New and Secondary Returns By Year for the Past Five Seasons We also filtered our data to discern the total number of returning birds recorded during each of the past five years and then compared that total to the number of newly banded birds From that season. From the chart below, it is easy to note that we banded only 555 new birds in 2009 but we recaptured 288 primary and secondary returns. Therefore, we handled 883 Painted Buntings without considering the recaptures that were not returns. This gives a clearer picture as to the actual number of birds that are part of the active population as opposed to considering only the number of newly banded birds. Year (New Birds) Total Returns Handled % of Birds Handled by Year* 2013 (641) 105 16 (746) 2012 (519) 102 19 (621) 2011 (450) 155 34 (605) 2010 (645) 112 17 (757) 2009 (555) 288 52 (883) Total (2810) 762 27 (3572) *Percentage as compared to the total number of newly banded Painted Buntings for that year

Four Year Banding Totals by Age and Sex There is also a need to consider the numbers of each age and sex that make up the total number of banded birds during a banding year. The chart below speaks volumes about the population trends over the past four years of banding as well as some species habits during the breeding season. The twelve second year birds recorded in 2012 are consistent with the disastrous breeding season of 2011. It is not a mystery why so many hatching year birds are encountered given that our banding stations are located in the habitats of the ranch where nesting occurs. 7

The hatching year birds also stay longer on the breeding grounds than the adults and have a much greater chance of hitting a net. It seems a mystery as to why so few ASY/SY Females are banded each year until you consider that females are most active in the nesting process during the active banding time of the year and depart from the ranch soon after they complete nesting. I have only considered four years of records for this chart. Virtually all the Painted Buntings recorded below were aged and sexed by me or one of my banding team that was supervised by me. Age/Sex ASY Female ASY Male HY-Unknown SY-Female SY-Male Total

2010 22 20 532 25 24 645

2011 41 161 10 35 203 450

2012 60 112 335 8 4 519

2013 82 66 367 26 104 641

Total 205 359 1244 94 335 2255

( 9%) (16%) (55%) ( 4%) (15%)

Research Initiatives During the 2013 season, we made specific efforts at the EWA banding station, the SCR banding Station and at a set of nets located along a fence line west of the Pecan Orchard at the Hummer House. Since this fence line is located between stands of trees and brush and an open field where there was a great deal of movement by Painted Buntings between these areas. During July, we made attempts to achieve banding saturation by continued banding efforts across a three day period at the same site. We banded between 40 and 50 birds per day at both the EWA station and the Fence line locations without recapturing more that more than 20% of our total new birds on any given day. The only time we neared saturation was in mid-September when most adults and hatching year birds had already gone from the ranch and we started to recapture late year hatchlings in large numbers. Movement of individual birds between the remote sites has been extremely limited for these past years giving us confidence that at least 99% of Painted Buntings banded at a particular station site are part of the population in that 8

habitat. The distances between our station areas and the feeding ground are computed to be between 0.7 miles and 0.4 miles from that point. During our limited banding at the feeding site we have encountered a slightly higher percentage of birds from the remote sites We believe that a vast majority of the birds that use the feeding site nest and breed within 0.25 miles of that location. Since the feeding site is more or less in the center of our station sites, one would expect that birds nesting on the periphery of out station areas would be more likely to wander to the feeding area. Over the course of the past four years, we have located and checked Painted Bunting nests each breeding season. More than 30 nests have been found and checked at least once during this time. Most have been checked at least three times per season. To this date, we have never found a Brown-headed Cowbird egg or a hatchling in any of these nests. In the past five years, we have encountered Painted Buntings during more than one hundred banding efforts but we have not averaged catching one cowbird per season in our nets and we have never recorded a hatching year cowbird in association with the hundreds of hatching year Painted Buntings at any of our sites. We had one cowbird in 2013. It was a hatching year bird that was caught in the same net and on the same day as five hatching year and two adult Eastern Bluebirds. It was our observation that the cowbird was flying as part of the Bluebird nestlings present in the Pecan Orchard . Although we almost never net cowbirds, hundreds are caught in cowbird traps during the breeding season around the ranch. This presents a disagreement between of two sets of data along with a dichotomy of observations regarding cowbirds. If 600 cowbirds are trapped each season, the population should be larger than the number trapped and they should be netted in representative numbers as are all of the other species on the ranch. There are five active cowbird traps on the ranch. Four of those traps are located between 0.1 miles and 0.2 north of the southern property line. This southern boundary is marked by numerous small acreage home sites and one larger ranch. I am unaware of any attempts to control cowbirds on those properties. It is more than possible that the large number of cowbirds trapped in the ranch reside south of the property 9

and are attracted by the availability of grain in and around the traps or move across the ranch as vagrants at certain times of the year. As we move into 2014, we are pleased with the vast amount of data accumulated through our work with the Painted Buntings on the ranch. We ended 2013 with 6033 banded Painted Buntings and 724 verified records of returns. We have records of four birds that are at least 11 years of age. All of the four are at or near the national longevity record. In just the past five seasons, we have banded 2810 individuals. We have handled as many as 843 individual birds in a single year. Within the next seasons, we will be able to make accurate assessments of population at our banding stations and reach a definitive estimate of total birds on the ranch. We also need a few more seasons to assess the influence of migrant movements on our data as well as the mobility of birds between banding areas on the ranch. We still have the puzzle regarding the influence of cowbirds on these populations but through careful observations and records, this will also be resolved.

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