What Is Bird Banding?

Video Transcript

"Bird banding is a very interesting method that is commonly employed to study the movements of birds and the activities of birds. It was something that was first sort of pioneered and developed in this country in the early 1900's and while there are various ways to band birds and to capture them you know without harming them for small birds one of the most common ways is something called mist netting. A mist net is a very fine mesh net that looks a lot like a sort of an old fashioned woman's hair net and when mist nets are strung between poles they are about seven or eight feet high and you know fifteen to twenty feet in length. If these are strung through heavily wooded areas where against the back drop of foliage and leaves that netting is almost invisible then birds that are moving through the undergrowth or whatever, not seeing the nets will fly into them and the nets are loosely strung so there is pouches, they get entangled and then the bird bander regularly, periodically checks the nets, very carefully removes the bird and takes it to a place where then it can be banded. The banding process itself is fairly straightforward, a very small aluminum band is placed around the leg of the bird sort of if this was his foot, sort of ankle on the lower part of the tarsus of the leg and that band contains a number and some information and every bird that is ever banded has a unique identifying number and the information on the little band is so that if anybody finds the bird, either recaptures it or maybe it flies into a window and somebody picks it up on their deck or whatever and finds it dead, if they remove the band it tells them to notify the US Fish and Wildlife Service with their headquarters in Laurel, Maryland and supply the information about the band number if they know what kind of a bird it is, or even if they don't and so forth and so on so that that's the way that over time as millions and millions of birds have been banded information is obtained. Now for things like ducks and birds that are regularly hunted by hunters and so forth that's one of the easiest ways to get band information back because the birds are regularly being harvested and if somebody, a hunter finds a duck that has a band on it he removes the band, sends the information to the US Fish and Wildlife Service and through that technique eventually a huge amount of information has been gained about the comings and goings of bird species in this country. In addition to the US Fish and Wildlife Service getting information the person who submits the band is also notified so they get to find out where that gold finch or that mallard duck or whatever the bird is that had the band on it was banded so it is a reciprocal arrangement, everybody gets to benefit. Now just to take that to the next level it's also possible to band birds with color bands so that using binoculars you can look at the combination of bands because you can put sometimes several of these small lightweight bands on a bird without doing any damage so if there is a red over green on the left leg and a silver band on the right ankle or whatever that information eventually can be useful to either the researchers who are studying let's say a bird that is on its territory so that you can see it every day or maybe birds coming to a feeding station or whatever. In the case of some of the shore birds and sandpipers and things that are long distance migrants that actually breed in Canada and spend the winter in South America a lot of them are being banded so that it is possible looking through binoculars or a telescope to look at color bands or even little colored flags that are placed on the legs of the birds so it is a research technique basically that allows bird banders who are licensed in other words this is not something you want to just try at home. You have to be licensed to bird band, to band birds. It's a way that they have derived a huge amount of information about the comings and goings of migratory birds as well as the behavior of birds in a confined area and so forth, how long they lived, etc."