The Enterprise — Michael Koff
A blue jay appears to smile at Amanda Dillon, field ecologist and entomologist at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, after she placed a band on its leg Friday morning.

The Enterprise — Michael Koff
Marking a visitor: Amanda Dillon, field ecologist and entomologist at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, uses a small pair of pliers to place a band on a blue jay's leg.

— Photo by Allen Landes
The preserve’s conservation director, Neil Gifford, related the story of a male prairie warbler who was first banded in 2014 in the King’s Road Barrens the year after his birth and recaptured there again in 2016 by Dillon as part of the preserve’s prairie warbler migration research. Gifford captured the same bird again in the Madison Avenue Pinelands in 2017 and collected blood and feather and claw samples to assess the quality of its winter habitat. He was captured the next summer, too, at the King’s Road banding station, and then not seen again until this past August when a volunteer, Allen Landes, photographed him in the Madison Avenue Pinelands. “It is simply stunning to think about the things this little 8-gram bird has experienced during his nine 4,000-mile round trips between the Albany Pine Bush Preserve and the island of Hispaniola …,” said Gifford. “According to the USGS, he is now one of the four oldest documented prairie warblers in the USA.”

The Enterprise — Michael Koff
Sunlight highlights the tail feathers of a mourning dove at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve bird-banding station on Friday.