Thursday January 2nd
Finally, the weather is cooperating -19C Southeast wind feels like -29C.
Deployed traps on Jan 02 but I think I am using the wrong bait & maybe the trap is toooo small!!! It was lucky that she missed all the decoys that were near the trap, because her feet are HUGH. This location had birds feeding at two different sites.
I deployed traps in both locations, one with an audio lure and the other with decoys. The birds (mostly Horned larks) as you can see fed mostly between the two locations.
That old saying “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush” rang true on Thursday Jan 2. Eventually a HOLA wandered into the trap, soooooo… if one goes in several will follow. I decided to wait for 10-15 minutes before retrieving the bird, got a band ready, got the wing rule and scale out, got a bag ready…….went to get the bird and watched it walk out of the trap!!!!! DECIDED THAT WON’T HAPPEN AGAIN!!!!!
Friday, January 3rd
Deployed the traps before sunrise, with a three-trap set where most of the action was on Thursday. Set a single trap in the other location. Wanna guess which site the birds were active at????
If you picked location 2 you are correct.
A rough estimate 100-150 snow buntings & 15-20 horned larks. All wandering around the trap, I was patiently waiting for them to go into the trap, one did, jumped out of the truck and watched it walk out of the trap.
I think I will just call them feed stations as trap doesn’t seem to be correct.
The snow buntings hung around for 15-20 minutes then departed taking the larks with them. Larks showed up about 15 minutes later, bounced around the feed station for 30 minutes, but never entered.
Guess I will try decoys & a full trap set on Sunday.