April 10, 2009

Friday 10~~~~We drove out to the Hummingbird House again today to participate in the Hummingbird banding again. Kent and I have decided to adopt one today. John and Linda adopted one last year and they named theirs Lionel, we decided to name ours Pepsi 2. The day was very windy, and we were afraid there wouldn't be many Hummingbirds feeding today. Were we ever wrong, they were caught faster than the recorders could keep up with all the measurements and records they keep on each of them. There were a lot of them adopted today and there were several banded birds caught and their cards were pulled and updated with their growth and weight. Their adopted family will get a new picture and a letter about their growth in the mail. The money earned from the adoptions helps pay for the study of the birds and the upkeep of the gift shop on the property. We helped hold them in their cages (picture) until they were ready for them and we had to tell the catchers to stop for awhile for the recorders to catch up. It puts too much strain on the birds if they are held in the small cages to long. Finally our name came up for adoption and we got lots of pictures of our bird Pepsi 2. One picture is them measuring the tail and the length of the bird, one is putting the band on and one is feeding it before Kent released it. I like the speckled picture of our bird trying to fly in its cage. Kent held Pepsi 2 and released him while I held one for another lady who we met last week and was done for a bird to adopt and there wasn't one for her, she knew we would be here again, so I got the honor of releasing her bird for her. We are going to send her lots of pictures we took of her bird to her. It might sound dull to some of you, but we really enjoyed it and to see how tiny they really are up so close and the beauty of the different colors beautiful to see so close. The pictures are posted wrong, start at the bottom to see them if order.