Choose Granite Countertops Near Me Wellfleet, MA for Elegance and Durability

WELLFLEET — James Junda reaches into a net set up in the middle of the woods and untangles a bird, an American redstart. The bird chirps loudly in an apparent cry for help.

Junda threads his fingers through the net’s strands, loosening a wing, then a claw. He cradles the gray and yellow patterned bird’s head between between his index and middle finger until he frees it.

“It takes about a hundred birds before you really get the hang of it,” he said.

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But he doesn’t let it go.

Junda quickly slips the bird into a small drawstring cotton pouch, tightens it, and adds it to a collection of birds in pouches he has on his wrist as he carries on to see what another net has caught. To a random observer at the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, the scene may seem alarming, but Junda and his team of volunteers are conducting important research about migratory birds through a practice called bird banding.

According to Mass Audubon, bird banding is a longstanding conservation practice that uses ultra-fine mist nets — delicate mesh placed where migrating flocks are likely to pass — to safely catch birds for study. Certified banders record each bird’s vital details — species, weight, approximate age, sex, and condition. Then they fit a numbered aluminum ring around its leg. The information is added to a national database that helps scientists trace migration routes and monitor population trends.

It’s delicate work, more like jewelry repair than field science. And 47-year-old Junda is a pro. A wildlife biologist and master bird bander from Montreal, he has been a bird bander since 2004 and has run the Wellfleet station since 2014. He travels back and forth from Canada to the Cape during the fall and spring specifically for bird banding.

Several times a week, only when the conditions are just right, Junda and a group of volunteers will awake just past dawn to set up 23 nets across the sanctuary’s 1,183-acre property. Dawn is the hour when migrant birds are most active.

After setting up the nets one October morning, just past 7 a.m., Junda dons his shoulder bag of cotton pouches and his camera, and he and his volunteers fan out across the sanctuary to check what the nets caught. Every hour, the team repeats the loop, gently freeing whatever has flown in. The nets, nearly invisible unless you’re up close, resemble volleyball nets spun from strands of hair.

The practice itself has deep roots on this property. The Wellfleet Bay banding station stands on the former site of the Austin Ornithological Research Station, founded in 1926 — one of the first places in North America to use mist nets for scientific study rather than poaching.

“There is risk associated with it,” Junda said. “You’re interrupting the bird’s natural cycle. It would be great if we lived in a world where we could just let the animals free to do their thing. But we don’t live in that world anymore. The ecosystems are messed up, the animal numbers are declining in huge ways.”

Junda said he became a biologist out of a love for animals, but the work has turned him into a conservationist as he’s watched ecosystems deteriorate. He believes the small risks of banding are justified by the data that help protect those same species.

That morning, the team banded several species — goldfinches, common yellowthroats, American redstarts, and chickadees — among the roughly 60 species known to frequent the sanctuary. Some birds, like the American redstart, protested loudly as they were untangled; others sat more quietly, as if resigned to the routine.

Once the birds are freed, Junda carries them to the “banding station” — an area of wooden picnic tables on the sanctuary grounds. He calls out each measurement to a volunteer recorder: wing length, feather condition, band number (if they have one). He blows air onto the birds to part the plumage so he can note the breast’s color and fat reserves. Finally, he weighs each bird by placing it headfirst into a small plastic tube perched on a scale, then tips the tube to release it back into the sanctuary.

Junda said migration takes a heavy toll on birds, with mortality rates more than 10 times higher than during the rest of the year. Examining their physical condition, he said, helps scientists understand how well they’re surviving the journey.

Junda works with a small community of volunteers who return week after week that has bonded even outside of banding season.

“In a world where everybody’s looking for community,” he said, “we’ve actually managed to build one.”

For Junda, the work is as much about people as it is about data. “If you want people to care about these animals,” he said, “you have to connect them to it.”

Longtime volunteer Valerie Bourdeau, a magazine editor from Quebec who visits the Cape several times a year, said she “didn’t care about birds all that much” until she met Junda. When she saw bird banding in action, she was hooked.

“A bird in the hand is a very different experience than a bird in a tree. These are tough little things, and they have really complex lives, and you get to know them as individuals in a different way too once they’ve got a band on,” she said.

And that human-to-bird connection extends beyond the sanctuary. The team contributes daily eBird reports and hosts live banding demonstrations for school groups and visitors.

Junda said migratory birds connect people across continents — a reminder that “we all have the same birds” and live on the same planet.

Earlier in the week, Junda and his team had passed a record: 43 birds in a single net, the most they had seen in one sweep. Still, some slip away.

“We still have to count it — that bird still goes on the sheet,” he laughs. “The sheet of shame.”