CREW Bird Banding

Thrilled about this freshly banded Grasshopper Sparrow

As someone with a keen interest in birds and thirst to learn as much as I can about the different ways to study them, one of my main interests over the past few months has been to get experience mist-netting and helping to band birds. So imagine my excitement when I learned that I would get the opportunity to do these very things just a few minutes down the road at CREW!

A little background on bird banding: one of the best ways to understand avian movement and population demographics is by capturing individuals, attaching a small, metal band with a unique number to their legs, and then taking various body measurements such as mass and wing length before releasing them. One of the most common methods of trapping small birds is called mist-netting, which essentially consists of strong nets strung up between poles that, under the right conditions, can appear almost invisible. 

Grasshopper Sparrow

The banding at CREW is led by Bob Altman, an experience bird bander who has conducted extensive research on various avian species in Oregon and has been banding at this site for 3 years now. This banding project is focused on sparrows, in large part due to the extremely threatened Grasshopper Sparrow that winters here in south Florida. While Grasshopper Sparrows are the sparrows we most commonly get in the nets, he also bands Savannah and Swamp Sparrows when they do get caught.

Savannah Sparrow

Swamp Sparrow

One of the most surprising things to me so far is that about 40% of the sparrows that we catch are recaptures, meaning that they were already banded. Some of these recaptures were caught and banded by Bob at the exact same net 2 years ago, indicating that they migrated back to the same section of the same field each fall! Recaptures are super useful, because Bob can then go back to the data he took when he first banded that bird and see when and where he'd caught it and compare its body measurements. 

Flushing birds into the mist nets

You may be wondering how we get these birds to fly into the nets when they're set up in a big, open field? The method is pretty simply: we chase them. Between 4-7 volunteers will stand in a line parallel to the nets with a long rope stretched between them and walk quickly towards the nets, dragging the rope along and flushing birds towards their temporary prison. In the process, we get a lot of birds other than sparrows, mainly tons of Palm Warblers and the occasional Common Yellowthroat and House Wren. These species we just extract from the nets and immediately release (lucky ducks). When we encounter sparrows, we carefully put them into small cloth bags to be banded and processed. 

Banded Grasshopper Sparrow

This has been an awesome experience for me so far because Bob has been showing me all the different steps of mist-netting birds, including setting up and taking down the nets and extracting and handling birds in a safe manner. Banding is also an important way to inform the public about how researchers collect data on birds, and is a useful form of citizen science because of how visible and hands-on the process is. There are almost always between 3 and 6 volunteers who come out to help Bob every morning before sunrise, which really demonstrates how much people care about birds and are passionate enough to dedicate their time to helping in their conservation and research. While waking up before the sun can be tough sometimes, something about seeing the sun rise over the prairie and getting to hold birds is so humbling to me, and every morning I leave with a renewed sense of satisfaction that what we're doing is really contributing to our understanding and the conservation of these threatened species in the face of climate change and human development.

~ Lara