In 254 BC, Quintus Fabius Pictor recorded the use of birds as message carriers by the Romans. The leg bands we use do not harm birds or adversely affect their survival rates.įalcons Tom and Waylon from Xcel Energy’s Sherco plant, 2019īird banding has a long and storied history. We would not know that female falcons tend to stay within 200 miles of their natal nests, that males tend to stay within 70 miles of their natal nest, and that Zeus, the male at Woodman Tower in Nebraska, was a real outlier (Zeus was released in Rochester, New York: a straight-line distance of 945 miles). Without bird banding, we could not track the success of our cliff recovery program, know the history of any given site from year to year, or track the ebb and flow between urban and cliff-nesting populations. It allows us to track individual peregrine falcons, giving us an intimate look at how a species behaves as it recovers, grows, and eventually reaches stasis with its environment.

Bird banding has helped researchers gather information on mortality rates, dispersal patterns, migration, behavior, social structure, and seasonal and long-term population trends. Bird banding allows us to study the movement, survival, and behavior of the birds we band, and get life histories for at least some of the birds we watch. We sometimes get asked why we band birds.

Banding cam