Birds in the Hand

THE BERKSHIRE BIRD OBSERVATORY’S IMPASSIONED BEN NICKLEY

By Scott Edward Anderson // Photos By Olivia Douhan

From our July 23 Issue.

On a chilly late-April morning, just a few days before Earth Day, Ben Nickley steadily makes his way uphill through a shrubby woodland at Jug End State Reservation. It’s early, when birds are most active, and the footpath is muddy from the spring rains. Nickley is on his way to set up mist nets. A bag slung over his shoulder holds tools and materials he will need when the birds begin to hit the nets; two members of his crew head down to the wetlands to set up more nets there. This is the second spring of bird banding that Nickley has launched as part of a biodiversity survey of the South Taconic Range by Green Berkshires.

Ruby-crowned kinglet, Nickley’s “spark bird.”

Made of fine black nylon that is invisible to the birds, the mist nets resemble several badminton nets strung together. Nickley and his crew stretch the nets across areas where not only resident but also migratory birds are bound to travel on their journey along the Atlantic Flyway, one of the major routes for birds who breed in the far north and overwinter in the Caribbean or South America. “There’s a lot of wonderful habitat for migratory birds here in the Berkshires,” says Nickley. “Jug End is a known stopover spot, attracting birds and birders from around the region.”

Ben Nickley takes down mist nets at the end of a day of bird-banding at Jug End State Reservation.

Where they have placed the nets is not quite where you would expect—a nondescript area of low-growing shrubs, vines, and bushes. It’s a tangled mess, really, that you would likely walk by without noticing. Not so for the birds. This is exactly the kind of habitat they seek as they migrate through Berkshire County. Once the nets are in place—15 sets altogether in the shrubland and in the marshy wetland along Felton Creek—Nickley and his team will check them every 30 minutes over a six-hour period every day as long as there is good weather. “Birds don’t care much for rain,” he adds.

They capture and band birds throughout the spring migration from April through the end of May and then move up to higher elevations to survey breeding birds in what’s called a point count, during which Nickley will count the number of birds he sees or hears from fixed points over a specific period of time. He has over 200 points in southwest Berkshire County, Columbia County in New York, and several in Litchfield County, Connecticut. As summer winds down, he will return to the bird-banding station in South Egremont for the fall migration from mid-August through early November.

• • •

“We’ve got one!” Rowan Coltey-Reeves calls to Nickley via walkie-talkie. It’s the first bird of the day, a hermit thrush, resting in the pocket formed by overlapping nets. Coltey-Reeves, a recent graduate of Framingham State University, is in her second season of banding birds with Nickley and the Berkshire Bird Observatory—the avian research wing of Green Berkshires.

About the size of a robin, the hermit thrush has dun-brown feathers along its back, faint dark spots on its white breast, and a reddish tail. The bird is remarkably calm as Coltey-Reeves removes it from the net, placing its head between her index and middle fingers and cradling the bird with the rest of her hand. “This is called a bander’s grip,” she explains as she places the bird into a small cotton sack and loosely pulls tight a drawstring closure. Double-checking the net for any other birds, she heads back to the banding station a few hundred yards away.

As Coltey-Reeves prepares to work gently and quickly with the bird in the bag, Nickley explains the process and the various measurements they take, recording the data onto paper spreadsheets. Nickley wasn’t much into birds until he first saw a ruby-crowned kinglet, which he calls his “spark bird,” the bird that sparked his interest in birding, on the Ohio State University campus where he was doing his undergraduate work. Prior to that, he had been conducting research on wolf spiders and animal behavior. Seeing that bird opened up a whole new world to him. “This little bird played a pivotal role in my life,” Nickley says. He went on to get a Master’s in Biology from Virginia Commonwealth University but decided against pursuing a PhD. He preferred to be in the field.

“I pretty much bounced around the country from field research job to field research job,” he confesses. He applied to anything that piqued his interest: fieldwork in Tennessee, North Carolina, Montana, Washington State, and even New Brunswick in the Canadian Maritimes. When Nickley saw a posting about Green Berkshires looking for someone to conduct avian surveys for its biodiversity mapping project, he seized the opportunity to come home to Massachusetts. (He was born in Plymouth but grew up in the Midwest.)

With its large expanses of forested land—some of the largest blocks of uninterrupted forest in New England— Berkshire County is important for migratory as well as breeding birds, and the diversity of forest cover types combined with the region’s topography makes it a great spot to get a handle on what birds are found here and stop over here. It was an opportunity Nickley couldn’t resist.

• • •

Berkshire Bird Observatory bird-banding crew, Ben Nickley, Camille Beckwith, and Rowan Coltey-Reeves; Coltey-Reeves taking measurements.

Back at the banding station, Coltey-Reeves removes the hermit thrush from the bag and attaches an aluminum band to its leg, resembling a small ankle bracelet. Each band bears a unique, federally issued number that can be traced back to this banding station. She then measures the bird’s length, checks the wing shape and composition of feathers to determine its age, blows back its chest feathers to try to determine the bird’s sex—hermit thrushes, unlike other species such as cardinals, show little outward variation between males and females. The bird is then weighed by tipping its head down into an appropriately sized section of PVC pipe resting on a scale. The entire process takes ten minutes.

Coltey-Reeves taking measurements of a Northern flicker.

In the spring of 2022, Nickley and his team banded over 1,000 birds and recorded 74 species, with their busiest day being May 21, when they banded 72 individual birds. Fall migration brings a higher volume of birds, as the summer fledglings join the adults on their trip south. According to Nickley, his team banded 2,225 birds totaling 80 distinct species, including 30 black-capped chickadees on a single day in October.

“We’re really excited the station is up and running,” says Andrew Vitz, the state ornithologist with MassWildlife.

Examining plumage and feather structure helps to determine age of a bird.

“They’re adding a lot of good bird conservation data to the Berkshires, particularly at a time when there are so many environmental changes going on.”

Having a bird observatory in the Berkshires fills a gap in the knowledge about bird migration throughout the region. Most of the bird observatories are located on the coasts—think Cape May, New Jersey, Foreman’s Branch on the eastern shore of Maryland, and MassAudubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. The closest inland bird banding site is Braddock Bay on Lake Ontario in upstate New York. With the Berkshire Bird Observatory, Nickley hopes to fill that gap, and he’d like to see their banding station continue for years to come.

“Two years is good for beginning to understand what’s here,” he explains. “But you need about five years of data to really start to see trends.”

Vitz agrees, adding that “having the longer-term datasets provides a lot more value, especially with variations in migratory patterns.”

Thus far, Green Berkshires has funded the work of the Berkshire Bird Observatory, along with a small grant from the University of Vermont. In the future, however, Nickley would like to see the observatory grow into a more permanent fixture in the region. For that, he’ll need more funding for additional staff and outreach.

“We have seasonal people to help with banding,” Nickley says, referencing Coltey- Reeves along with Camille Beckwith, an intern who started this April. “We’re also building our volunteer network to bring the community in. We’ve had so much community support.”

Visitors who come to the banding station at Jug End get to witness birds up close in their natural habitat, connecting with birds beyond their backyard bird feeders. “That does something profoundly good for the person who has that experience,” says Nickley. “It makes them aware and it makes them care.

“A lot of birds in your backyard are up in the boreal forest in Canada and then down in the tropical forests in South America. Birds are the great connector.”

Educating the public is important to Nickley, who would love to be able to expand the program to do more outreach. While it’s difficult to do during the banding season, he recently led a bird walk at Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s home in Pittsfield. Guiding the small group of birders, Nickley is encouraging and informative—a natural—instructing the less-practiced among them about what to look for. “The size and shape of the birds is the most important thing to focus on,” he says. “You may not be able to see the color right away.”

When the group spotted a kestrel, Nickley offered to install a nesting box at Arrowhead for the raptors, something he’s done at Jug End as well. That’s another aspect of the Berkshire Bird Observatory’s work that he’s initiated. “The kestrel boxes are an important contribution,” Vitz from MassWildlife says. “Ben is super eager to get involved with anything bird conservation related.”

• • •

When she finishes banding the hermit thrush, Coltey-Reeves holds her hand flat, slowly releasing the bird from her gentle grip. The thrush rests there for a moment, calmly looking around, none the worse for the experience of being measured, weighed, and tagged. Then, in a flash, the bird takes flight from her hand, returning to the shrubs of the woodland, offering one final “chup, chup, chup” before it disappears.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” goes the old proverb. The bird banders of the Berkshire Bird Observatory may agree with that, although they’d probably prefer to capture and band the other two as they migrate through the region.

Follow the work of the Berkshire Bird Observatory on Instagram: @berkshire_bird_observatory