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The Worth of a Bird in the Hand By Cat Lazaroff SILVER SPRING, Maryland, October 5, 2002 (ENS) - What would possess someone to rise before dawn, drive for an hour from Maryland to Virginia, and stumble through the freezing dark to rig nets in the frosty woods? The treasure, the prize for this uncomfortable start is a tiny, trembling bundle of feathers in my hand. I am a bird bander.
Ask any bird bander why they do what they do, and they'll tell you it's for the science. Each bird captured in the fine, nearly invisible mist nets we have hung before first light provides a wealth of information about the health of the ecosystem in which we stand, and of the creatures that we, for brief moments, hold in our hands. To gather these data points, we string gossamer nets between trees, along streams, in open fields, to strain the region's breezes and gather their harvest of migratory birds. In the spring, the northern Virginia crop may include tiny, brilliant indigo buntings, almost small enough to slip through the mesh; flaming red northern cardinals, with their strong, seed - and finger - crushing bills; or even a magnificent pileated woodpecker, bearing a regal scarlet crest and wings large enough to tear the nets. In summer, the Virginia banding continues to document which birds are using open space - mostly military lands - to raise their young. In the fall, I band saw whet owls on a Maryland mountain, small fearless birds so comfortable with humans that they have been known to let bird banders walk up to their daytime roosts in young pine trees and pick them off a branch. Not content to wait for such luck, my partners and I lay our traps of nets and bait them with the recorded calls of their tiny owl species. In all seasons, the birds fly, unseeing, into the nets and become tangled in their strands. At brief and regular intervals, we banders patrol our sets of nets to locate the captured birds and quickly, gently, extricate them. We do this with bare hands - gloves dull the sense of touch, make it more difficult to remove the clinging threads of net, and make it more likely that we might accidentally harm one of our charges.
Once a bird is taken out of the net, we place a slender, aluminum band on its right leg, bearing a unique number assigned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency that permits and oversees our work. This band will identify the bird if it is caught again - though less than one percent of these small birds will ever hit a net again. We record the bird's band number and species on a banding log sheet, along with the date, time and location of its capture. We measure attributes such as wing chord - the length of the wing from "wrist" to tip - tail length and weight, check how much fat the bird has stored for its migration, and, if we can, identify the bird's sex and age. Then, often within five minutes of capture, the bird is released to continue its journey south, or north, or back to its nest, depending on the season. The information we have gathered is combined with data from other days, other sites, other seasons to form a detailed picture of which species are using which types of habitat and which populations are growing or declining. This picture can help land managers decide whether to plant trees or mow fields, or leave things just as they are. It can also provide early warning of species or habitats that are in trouble and may need more active intervention. We birders say we do all this for science. But we really do it for the birds.
I love to walk up to a net to see a Carolina chickadee or a tufted titmouse, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of my size, but determined to intimidate me with its ear piercing cries. When we catch a female Baltimore oriole, I love that the much more striking male flies back and forth around the net, calling to his captured mate - and rejoins her as soon as she is released. In the summer, it's a treat to see an entire family of Carolina wrens lying still in the bottom section of the net, hoping I don't see them. Because I know that this parent bird has bred successfully this year, and now is teaching her babies to find food in a wild place, not far from the sprawling suburbs of Washington, DC. Their bright eyes trained on ours, their impudent, defiant beaks and claws pecking and grasping at our fingers - this is nature at its finest. To hold their warm bodies and feel their tiny hearts beating is a privilege, an honor and a joy. To hear them squawk in outrage as we release them, and watch them winging free and wild into the air. That's why I get out of bed in the wee hours, or stay up all night. Because bird banding gives me a direct and vibrant connection to the environment around me - and a hope of helping to keep some of that environment intact. Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2002. All rights reserved. |
Birdbander holds a painted bunting in Texas (Photo courtesy 
Newly banded yellow-bellied flycatcher in New Jersey (Photo by Michael Miles courtesy 
Baltimore oriole in Maryland (Photo by Chan Robbins courtesy U.S. Geological Survey 