[Himalaya]

I was going to say this but decided not to but i am glad some one did

Originally Posted by Mysticete

Wonder how much CO2 is released from his traveling on holidays, which certainly can't be good for climate change, which is bad for birds :P

[mjh73]

I find the idea that ringing is a fun exercise done for purely personal purposes without consideration for the birds is a bit bizarre.

I have volunteered recently on a project in Australia, ringing bushbirds in a national park as part of an investigation into the impact of controlled burns.
Days in the field are bloody hard work in difficult terrain. The gear has to go in on foot into remote gullies, vegetation has to be cleared by hand to enable the mist nets to be set up - which is a challenge in itself in the dense bush - the days are long and you finish the day tired, scratched and often covered in ticks and leeches. Some days we catch little. If the weather is poor (too hot, or wet) we don't even go out (because the birds welfare would be at risk, not ours!).
The field team is supervised by an A class bander, and the care of the birds is paramount. I have spent two weeks with this project (and will be back out again in a couple of months) and while I have been there we have banded dozens of target species without loss, and released hundreds of bycatch, without loss. Nets are checked often, birds are released and processed quickly and if there is any concern about a bird it is released rather than put at risk. I recall one Brown Thornbill that I was about to process appearing crook so instead of processing we let the bird sit and rest in a shrub next to the processing site until it got itself straight and flew off. The concern of all of us on the team was palpable - we care about the birds and we were all stressed about the welfare of this bird. Generally though the birds were apparently untroubled after processing and it wasn't uncommon for birds to sit quite happily in our hands for a brief time during recovery before flying back into the bush. These were not highly stressed birds itchy to get away from a big scary predator.

So, with all that said, why did I volunteer to get involved? Because the project needed people to help it, and I thought it was a worthwhile investigation. Because I enjoy the science of ornithology and being in the bush generally as an antidote to my day job driving a desk. Because I wanted to learn something. Because I wanted to meet like minded people. So, yes, I had selfish reasons for being there too, but NEVER would I let that supercede my concern for the birds.

The question has been asked "What do we have to find out about [species X] that we don't already know?". This I also find a bizarre suggestion. Populations and distributions are not static, they are dynamic and can be rapidly so. Past information can tell us about the state of populations ONLY at the time of sampling. Ongoing monitoring can tell us about trends and changes. But if we don't monitor going forward then we might fail to detect developing trends that might be of concern, and we might miss the opportunity to take prudent conservation action in time. Even what we define today as common species can rapidly decline as we have seen time and time again. Good luck getting funding to support conservation action without robust scientific data that demonstrates there is a problem.

There needs to be an appreciation that sometimes science has to be carried out with an impact on individuals, but ultimately for the greater good of the population. We can see from the life histories of many birds species that these same decisions get taken by the birds themselves.