LARAMIE - At 6 in the morning, there aren't too many people up and moving around, but there sure are a lot birds - kingfishers swooping across streams, yellow warblers building nests, American robins foraging for food, common grackles calling out as the sun tips into day, sounding like a rusty gate swinging over and over and over.

If you want to study birds, though, you have to get up with them. And Sundays during the summer, volunteers and Audubon Wyoming staff start early to collect data and band birds as part of a nationwide bird monitoring program.

Created by the Institute for Bird Populations, the MAPS program - Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship - compiles data from 500 stations, including one near Laramie, to look at local, regional and national bird trends.

It's just after daybreak and we're out at a ranch near Centennial stringing nets between aluminum poles. When faced straight on, the hair net-thin netting is nearly impossible to see.

We put up 10 nets around the ranch in different habitats, from riparian areas to wooded thickets to grassy areas.

A few minutes later, we go back to find two yellow warblers tangled in the netting, suspended unmoving in mid-air. Kim Check, community naturalist for southeast Wyoming, starts to untangle the bright yellow bird, which regards her with unblinking black eyes.

She cups the bird in her palm as she first frees the feet, then the wings, then the head, and places it in a small flannel bag.

"That way he feels safe and secure," she said as she pulled the drawstring to close the bag. The tiny bird, now a soft lump, didn't move as we walked back to the station, a picnic table several stream crossings away.

There, Check holds the bag closed as she slides her hand in and pulls out the bird, tucked between her fingers. The bird species is easy to identify from the warblers yellow plumage.

Later in the day, a debate would arise over the difference between a veery and a Swainsons thrush, which seemed to come down to subtle shading variations of brown/grey feathers versus brown/grey/red feathers and whether buff-colored eye rings were distinct or not.

Using pliers, Check squeezed a tiny, numbered aluminum band onto one leg to identify the bird, careful to make sure the band could slide up and down the leg freely but was tight enough not to slide over the foot. If that were to happen, "then he's pretty much screwed," said Audubon Wyoming's conservation programs manager Alison Lyon-Holloran.

Holding the bird belly-up, Check blew on the chest feathers to part them, revealing male and female sex characteristics. Then she checked the feathers for wear, measured them and estimated an age, recording her data in a notebook. The yellow warblers age can be narrowed by looking at changes in the bird's color - sharper yellow coloring indicates an adult bird.

When she finished, she walked a few feet from the station, knelt down with the bird cupped in both hands, and opened them to let him free. The warbler darted into some nearby trees and was gone.