Mike Morrison began banding with the Southern Illinois Bird Observatory (now defunct) in 1976 while he was a graduate zoology student at Southern Illinois University. He quit in 1978, and resumed in Zuma Canyon in California in 2016. A lot had changed in 38 years. Not only were the birds different here, there was a dramatic increase in the information we had available to age birds by small plumage differences. There was a learning curve involved in that, and the learning curve continues with new nomenclature for molt patterns.
In 2017, Mike moved to La Verne and began banding as a subpermittee on city-owned land in the Marshall Canyon Conservation Corridor. This area is a mix of chaparral, scrub oak woodland, elderberry, toyon and laurel.
Mike has scores of net sites scattered over a span of one kilometer, but he generally uses only six or eight nets at a time, since there aren’t yet enough trained volunteers to operate more. In summer he participates in the MAPS program coordinated by The Institute for Bird Populations. (MAPS stands for Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship.) During the rest of the year, he rotates from one area to another.
