Banding or Ringing

Banding Together

Much of what we know about birds, and most especially migration, has been learnt from studies involving the catching and identification of individual birds. Banding, (in the USA) otherwise known as ringing, (in the UK) is undertaken by amateurs and professionals all over the world at bird observatories, constant effort sites and elsewhere. Love it or loath it, it has undoubtedly made a great contribution to the science of ornithology and to birding.

Looking out for bands can add to your hobby too and there are websites out there just dedicated to sightings of colour-ringed birds. Somewhere on this page there will be just the link you need if you spot a leg-ring and want to know more, or find a banded bird corpse and want to know what you should do next. Colour ringing is usually used by projects studying a group of birds in a particular place in order to show family structures, behaviour, distribution, etc.

For ringing in general two different conventions exist:

There is the general ringing or banding of birds, whereby a lightweight metal ring is attached to the leg of a captured bird that is then returned to the originator if the bird has been found dead or recaptured at another ringing site. This has been used to see which populations migrate where, how birds expand territory etc.

Common Yellowthroat Geothlypis trichas being banded – ©Lorie Shaull, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

There are also banding / ringing schemes using colour bands to make it possible to identify different individuals in the field. This has been used to show, for example, that, contrary to what you may believe, you are not getting the same 4 blue-tits at your garden feeders but, over just a few days it may be 70 different individuals!

It is not just movement than that can be deduced from ringing records, but longevity, site loyalty and much more. Many local observatories offer courses where you can learn how to band and join ringing schemes. Increasingly, radio tags are used to track bird movements, particularly where there are reintroduction schemes or there is a threat of loss by human action, such as tagging Hen Harriers on English grouse moors. In the UK, many bird observatories use a system which automatically registers any tagged bird as it flies close by. This has been used, for example, to track the movements of White-tailed Eagles introduced in the Isle of Wight in southern England, and it has shown that the birds.