Funny thing happened as Dennis was roaming about yesterday. Dennis had decided to see if he could track down Spencer as he has been hanging around out east in Winnipeg. We've never been able to locate a site the birds seemed to visit so we were interested in seeing where he was basing his operations. Because of his transmitter, we'd been able to narrow the field a bit. What Dennis found is that a) Spencer looks wonderful, still very brown but not really all that surprising given his age (11 months old), b) Spencer has found a nice place to hang out where there is food, c) Spencer has found a buddy to hang out with which is wonderful and d) Spencer is likely a girl.
As you might remember from last year, Spencer was the middle-sized bird, closer to Kelly in body size but closer to Bogart in foot size. Because putting bands on that are too large is dangerous, we erred on the side of caution and band him as a male. So now we have a male named Annie in Fargo and a female named Spencer hanging out in Winnipeg. The birds really do like to play with our plans for them
Spencer's buddy is older looking at the plumage, and while we suspect Spencer is too young to nest successfully, we'll keep an eye on these two just in case - stranger things have happened - look at Marv and Terminator in Grand Forks, they are giving it a try despite Marv's young age ...
