First to Finish: Spring 2015

A bird gets its band, then flies back to the bush; a late night session with a computer program; a color throw to celebrate Holi -- snapshots of the end of Spring Term 2015 show the diversity of academics and campus life at Knox.

Biology professor James Mountjoy's class in Ornithology spent the last class of the term at Green Oaks, Knox's biological field station -- 700 acres of prairie, forest, and aquatic habitat, about 20 miles from campus in central Knox County. In the morning-long field session, the class banded an Eastern Phoebe and a House Wren -- though most of the time is consumed in setting up a mist net, playing recorded bird calls, waiting to catch a bird in the net, and then untangling the trapped bird from the almost invisible netting threads.

"We applied standard aluminum bands that have a unique identifying number that can be read if the bird is recaptured or found dead," Mountjoy explained. "If we were doing a behavioral study, we would have applied additional colored bands to give a distinctive combination that can be read in the field to enable individual identification without recapturing the bird."