LAKE CASITAS : Scrub Jay Changes a Woman’s Career

Jan Wasserman heard the rusty-machine call of a red-winged blackbird flying by and the cry of a coot in a nearby pond, but the cheep of a hatchling bluebird cupped in her hand commanded her attention.

The certified bird bander had gently scooped the week-old Western bluebird chick, featherless and scrawny, from its nest. Within moments, she had clamped a band on each leg, weighed it and placed it back with its three siblings.

“I try to handle them as little as possible. It does stress them,” Wasserman said.

Wasserman is one of only two bird banders in Ventura County, and spring is her busy season. Some weeks she bands as many as four to eight chicks in each of 20 nests, working mainly on a ranch north of Lake Casitas.

One of the bands is silver-colored, coded for fish and wildlife officials with the U.S. Department of the Interior. The other is gold, indicating that the bird was banded in 1991. Banding helps provide information about birds’ habits, migrations and longevity, she said.

The 350-acre ranch, studded with live oak, sycamore and cottonwood trees, has been made into a nature preserve by owner John Taft. Enhanced by ponds and plantings, it attracts a variety of birds.

The nests are in some of the 120 boxes designed and built for cavity-nesting birds by Virgil Ketner of the Ventura Audubon Society.

These include house wrens, ash-throated flycatchers, violet-green swallows and the plain titmouse. Some are year-round residents, but others migrate from Central and South America.

Wasserman also bands orioles that fashion basket nests on the backs of palm fronds, and black phoebes that build mud nests.

After banding each bird, she enters its vital statistics into a database for the national wildlife agency on a laptop computer that she carries in her Jeep.

Wasserman, 45, is not an ornithologist by profession. She had been an insurance claims adjuster until one day she held out her hand with a peanut in it and a scrub jay landed, ate and flew off. She was hooked. She learned bird banding and gave up her job for volunteer work.

“My payment is to be here, be with the birds and know I’m doing something that is part of nature,” Wasserman said. “Not all payment is in dollars and cents.”