A crowd gathered as Meredith McBurney plucked a bright, squirming yellow warbler from a net.

“He’s so cute!” someone whispered.

“That’s a good bird,” McBurney said to him as she loosened fibers wrapped around his foot. “This one got pretty tangled.”

She slipped him into a drawstring bag, then led her human guests back to a shelter nestled in the trees.

It was just another spring day at the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies’ banding site in Littleton. McBurney has led work here since the Denver Audubon Society’s Kingery Nature Center by Chatfield Reservoir started in 2008.

The warbler wore a metal anklet, proof he was already part of something much bigger than himself. He was being tracked for science, one of millions whose movements, schedules and health are tabulated each year around t

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