Has Bird Ringing/Banding had its day? (1 Viewer)

I'm not trying to be deliberately provocative here as I know there are many dedicated bird ringers all over the globe who put a lot of effort into this but, is it really a modern scientific process any longer?. How many new discoveries are being made as a result of bird ringing these days?. I can see satellite tagging of birds being used to open up new lines of discovery and research and am all for that.

Ringing/banding though seems to me a thing of the past, like birds egg collecting, useful once but old hat now. Are modern ringers collecting totals/species/lists - a bit like twitchers, to impress their mates?

Birds caught in mist nets are surely distressed by the experience, however briefly, and carrying a metal ring on their leg for the rest of their life cannot have any benefit to the bird. What benefit do we get?. How many recoveries as a percentage of the number ringed do we see?. What do we learn that we don't already know?.

I'd like to know.

Peter

I have seen pics of passerine rarities (second record for my whole country of Little Bunting, unexpected for particular area Red-breasted Flycatcher, some of those species pairs where it is always stressed that you must check minute feather differences for proper ID etc.) which were mist-netted for ringing, and otherwise would be misidentified as a different species or just missed.

Absolutely still useful, and it is still the only practical way to get good data on movement, survival, demographics, etc. for small songbirds. It can also be a great supplement to visual and aural surveys, especially in the tropics where many cryptic and/or rare understory species can easily be missed. Maybe things are different in the UK, but bird banders in the US are only permitted to capture birds for specific projects, and certainly can't go out netting just in hopes of adding to their capture list (as a bander, I personally don't keep one). I don't know anybody who "goes banding" in the same way that they go birding.

It's a common misconception that ringing is just about finding out about migration patterns. What is far more useful these days (from a European perspective at least) is data on things that ovenbird43 has pointed out.

I agree with ovenbird43. Bird banding/ringing still serves a very useful purpose. I am a bird bander and we report all of our data to the United States Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS).

I would add one thing to the list by ovenbird: information on production of young versus older birds especially where protocols call for constant effort year by year.

As mentioned by others, much of the tropics lack even the most basal knowledge and there capture and banding definitely has a lot of value even beyond what ovenbird wrote

Niels

Niels

ovenbird43 said:

Absolutely still useful, and it is still the only practical way to get good data on movement, survival, demographics, etc. for small songbirds. It can also be a great supplement to visual and aural surveys, especially in the tropics where many cryptic and/or rare understory species can easily be missed. Maybe things are different in the UK, but bird banders in the US are only permitted to capture birds for specific projects, and certainly can't go out netting just in hopes of adding to their capture list (as a bander, I personally don't keep one). I don't know anybody who "goes banding" in the same way that they go birding.

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Does this mean that if bird banders in the US catch birds of species which are not part of their specific projects they have to release them un-banded?

Ringing / banding birds is more relevant now than it ever was as the birds are coming under increasing threats from loss of habitat, climate change etc. Apart from the reason given for ringing birds in the tropics, colour ringing, particularly of waders, is turning up knew knowledge and areas of research all the time. The concept that ringers only catch birds for their own lists is totally false, as is the idea that we know all that can be got from ringing. Some constant effort sites have been worked for well over half a century and are still producing novel data. Science is always intrusive and the OP mentions satellite tagging. Without the birds being caught how are the tags going to be put on the bird? Is the placing of a transmitter and harness on a bird more, or less 'harmful' to the bird than glueing a transmitter to the feathers or rings on the legs? Is the shorttterm process of glueing the transmitter to the birds feathers going to produce the data you require? No? Then you have to use a harness. Don't forget that, unless you fit a harness, the transmitter is shed at the next moult. The arguments against ringing are very similar to the arguments against the scientific collection of invertebrates - and are formed from the same rather twee concepts of the natural world based on sentimentality and not science. And the final question supposing we already know 'everything'? That is just arrogance.

Allen S. Moore said:

Does this mean that if bird banders in the US catch birds of species which are not part of their specific projects they have to release them un-banded?

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No, except for incidental captures that require special permits for banding (e.g. hummingbirds).

EDIT: to give a more complete answer, a researcher can band anything for which they are permitted; "passerines and near-passerines" is one of the permit categories, so a researcher working on, say, bluebirds, might be technically permitted to banding any other songbird that gets captured. Whether that person actually does is another matter, and depends on time constraints, whether or not they have the correct bands on hand, and any concurrent studies they are pursuing. I would posit that many, if not most, researchers working on species-specific projects band only their target species.

Zheljko said:

I have seen pics of passerine rarities (second record for my whole country of Little Bunting, unexpected for particular area Red-breasted Flycatcher, some of those species pairs where it is always stressed that you must check minute feather differences for proper ID etc.) which were mist-netted for ringing, and otherwise would be misidentified as a different species or just missed.

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That's a trapping argument rather than a ringing one, though, isn't it?

John