We are featuring wonders from various research and science projects happening in the field by Merry Lea staff. This blog is about the bird banding research conducted at Merry Lea: we give you an overview of what bird banding is, how we band birds and why we do it.
– Written by Carol Good-Elliott, Environmental Educator
Bird banding research has been a highlight during the summers at Merry Lea since 2001. Staff and volunteers wake up very early in the morning to learn more about the flying inhabitants of Merry Lea. However, due to safety restrictions related to COVID-19, we are not banding this summer in order to protect both the human team and the birds.
In this article we want to share a taste of what a day of bird banding includes and why some of us are #hookedonbanding!
What is bird banding?
At its most basic, bird banding involves catching birds and putting a metal band around the bird’s lower leg. The band doesn’t harm the birds: it’s similar to humans wearing a bracelet or anklet. Each band has a unique number, different from any other band in the U.S., including bands already made or that will be made in the future. This band number provides a way of identifying any individual bird that has been banded.
Our banding at Merry Lea focuses on songbirds and woodpeckers that spend the breeding season – or summer – at Merry Lea.
How do you Band birds?
To catch the birds we use mist nets, so-called because they are very hard to see. These nets are 12 feet tall x 36 feet long and are made of very fine black nylon thread. When a mist net is open, it has “pockets” that gently hold any bird that flies into the net (see the photo below). For humans, this is akin to resting in a hammock.
We have a set of 10 nets that are open for 6 hours each day we band. Every half hour we check each net and remove any birds that have been caught. Each bird first receives a band on its leg. Then we record the band number and other information about the bird including its sex, breeding condition, age and a variety of measurements.
Why do we band birds?
Our banding research at Merry Lea is part of a much larger research project run by The Institute for Bird Populations. For 30 years, IBP has run a project known as MAPS – Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship. This project gathers banding data from banding stations throughout the United States and Canada. So far it includes information from more than 2 million capture records!
Bird banding is a type of research known as capture-mark-recapture. We capture a bird, mark it with its own individual band number, record information about the individual, and when/if we recapture the same individual we gather the same type of information and can compare it to the original data.
The purpose of this research project is to better understand the life stages of bird species and their populations. By looking at birds’ life stages, we can look for patterns and trends that affect bird species’ population increase or decrease. Bird banding data allows researchers to estimate survival rates of individual birds, get a sense of how many young birds are produced each year, and determine how many new adult birds are breeding each year. It also gives some ideas about their movement patterns throughout the year. Data from each of these aspects contribute to those overall patterns and trends.
The project is seeking to answer questions like these:
- What factors drive avian (bird) population declines?
- Where are the biggest challenges for birds – on the breeding or non-breeding grounds?
- What drives differences in trends between particular regions or habitats?
- What is the relationship between population change and weather, climate, or habitat loss?
- What can we do to reverse declines?
The strength of this study comes from a number of factors:
- Data has been collected using the same methods for 30+ years
- There is a very large amount of data collected each year
- The data comes from many different parts of North America
- The data is collected in a variety of ecosystems which include habitats for many different songbird species.
While our Merry Lea banding team can’t contribute new data to the project this year, the MAPS project is still a strong, valid project due to its longevity and size. We look forward to contributing to bird conservation and banding again next summer!
