National News> Banding Birds

Return that band
Since we started banding in 2002, we have had a number of hunters ask how banding evolved and what it entails. John Dyer explains.

This article first appeared in Fish and Game magzine Special Issue 26 and appears here by kind permission of the publishers

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN BANDING BIRDS for centuries. The Greeks and the Romans, for instance, tied messages to swallows and pigeons, knowing they would return home with
them. And Marco Polo wrote that falcons in China around 1300AD were banded, so they could be returned to their owner. But the first systematic, scientific banding efforts began around 1899 when Hans Mortensen, a Danish school teacher, began placing metal rings on the legs of European teal and pintail ducks, storks, starlings, and several types of hawks. He put his name and address on them, hoping they’d be returned to him if found. His efforts inspired similar projects in many other European countries.

An early United States banding pioneer was American Jack Miner, who established a waterfowl sanctuary in Kingsville, Ontario. He distinguished himself from other private banders by using bands to spread the word of God. One side of the band would read: “Write Box 48, Kingsville, Ontario”. The other, an inscription, such as “Have faith in
God”. Between 1909 and 1939, he banded 20,000 Canada geese this way and spread scripture throughout the continent. But the king of private American bird banders is Edward McIlhenny, whose company introduced and still markets to the world Tabasco Sauce. An avid hunter, Mr. “Ned” as he was known, banded 190,000 mostly gamebirds in his lifetime. As well as this, he found time to save the snowy egret from extinction by
creating the Bird City refuge on Avery Island, Louisiana. Inspired by the successes of such private efforts, the US government began to coordinate bird banding in that country from 1920. Today, more than 5 million birds are banded worldwide every year.

All modern bands have a return address and early US bands abbreviated the Biological Survey’s Washington, D.C. address to “Biol. Surv. Wash. D.C.”, but one lot produced in England misspelled it to read; “Boil. Surv. Wash. D.C.” A hunter wrote back that he had shot a banded crow: “I followed the instructions on the band, but am badly disappointed with the result. I Washed, Boiled and Surved, but the darned thing
still wasn’t fit to eat.” The first bird banding in New Zealand occurred when T.W. Kirk fastened “a bit of red stuff” around the leg of each sparrow he was studying in 1880. Later in 1936, Lance Richdale banded his first royal albatross at Tairoa Head. Similar ad
hoc efforts in the 1930s and 1940s led to a confusing array of homemade bands, often with no clear instructions about who to report recoveries to. Demand for an organised scheme in New Zealand led the Ornithological Society to establish a banding scheme for non-gamebirds in 1950. When its scale became too much for the Society’s honorary
workers, the endeavour was transferred to the Dominion Museum in 1962. Gamebirds were banded by the Wildlife Service in a separate scheme.

Eventually in 1967, all banding was coordinated in a National Banding Scheme under Wildlife Service (now Department of Conservation) control. This includes all Fish & Game, DoC, Ornithological Society, and private banders. Incidentally, it is illegal to just put any old band on a wild bird, as ill-fitting or poorly designed bands can actually cause injury as well as confusion when they’re discovered.

By 1995, well over one million birds had been banded in New Zealand, 160,000 individual birds had been recovered, and the Banding Office computer held over 270,000 recovery records (since many birds were caught more than once). Outstanding
recoveries include a royal albatross that was banded at Campbell Island, but which was
recovered in Argentina, 7900km away; a sooty shearwater banded in Cook Straight, which found its way to Japan, 11,270km away. A harrier hawk banded in (where else?) Hawke’s Bay turned up later in Invercargill, 1000km down country. Even house sparrows have been recorded travelling 300km from point of release.

Long-distance flights are not confined to nongamebirds. While most grey, mallard, and paradise duck are shot near where they were banded, there are marked exceptions. For instance, one grey duck banded in Marlborough turned up in Australia. Similarly, a number of Waikato grey duck have been shot in the South Island. Mallards, too, sometimes undertake heroic journeys to the Chatham Islands and the Sub-Antarctic islands. One mallard banded in Otago was shot 16 months later in Adelaide and is just one of several New Zealand mallards to be recovered in Australia. While these sorts of wanderings are the exception, for shoveler duck they are the rule. Every year birds
of this species travel the length of the country, with birds banded in Otago, for instance, being found as far away as Kaitaia. Conversely, spoonies banded in the Waikato have been found as far south as Otago. One individual banded as a duckling at
Lake Pukepuke in the Manawatu in December was found in Otago five months later, then flew back to nest at Lake Pukepuke in August, just a few hundred metres from where it was first captured. The pattern (if there is one) for these shoveler wanderings
is difficult to fathom, largely because they are so extremely hard to capture to band. It’s hoped that as radio transmitter technology improves, and become small enough for shoveler-sized birds to carry, that satellite tracking might provide some answers about these migrations. Grey teal also fly the length of the country, but whether this is simply a response to food availability is not known. It may be that this Australian species
is programmed to move around to protect its population from the ravages of drought. There is an as yet unproven belief that numbers of grey teal arrive in New Zealand whenever harsh drought grips their native homeland, including just recently.

Without bands, it’s more problematic to prove, but certainly one grey teal accidentally shot in the Waikato had been banded in Victoria, Australia. Of course, with a potential $100,000 fi ne and six months jail attached to harming this protected species, New Zealand hunters might be forgiven for being less than forward about returning any
teal bands, even though the information is vital. However, banding is not just about tracking long movements, but about understanding a range of population dynamics. For instance, extensive banding of black swan was able to demonstrate that these birds exist in a number of sub-populations. For instance Waikato and Kaipara Harbour
birds are probably of the same flock. When their numbers are down on the Waikato lakes, they are very often up on the Kaipara Harbour and visa-versa.

Banding allows us to recognise these various sub-populations and manage each accordingly as a group. Similar extensive banding of paradise ducks has not only confirmed that there are recognisable sub-populations, but also showed up that some of these were being over-harvested. Band studies demonstrated that parries were making up an over large part of the hunters’ bag in some districts, but that their productivity was lower than the mallards, whose bag limits they’d been lumped in with.

Today, all Fish & Game regions are aware of the need to manage parries accordingly.
With all species, the number of bands returned is an extremely useful guide to the scale of harvest, enabling waterfowl managers to track the fate of each generation of birds. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, many hunters are only too keen to hand in the first band they get, but many soon tire of the business once they’ve done this a
number of times. This is especially the case when people shoot not far away from a banding site and the information the hunters get sent back shows the birds were mostly banded nearby. Bands are subsequently left lying around in drawers and on shelves in the woodshed. Under-reporting then becomes a major error factor for waterfowl managers.

They then have to assume that these unreported birds died of natural causes which forces them to set overly conservative limits. So please, keep sending those bands in, as they’re vital to understanding the population dynamics of the birds concerned. The bird shot 10km from the banding site is just as useful to us as the one that flew the length of the country. Banding is an essential part of gamebird management and a large
amount of effort and your licence dollars are used to make it happen. It simply fails if the hunters don’t play their part. To send in a band, it’s a good idea to flatten it with pliers first, cellotape it to your letter, and post it in with the details: where found, when, how recovered, (ie. shot), and by whom, so we can send a reply. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting your letter with a hole in it where the unflattened band got pushed out during its journey. Similarly, be careful not to mix up bands. If
you get three bands at three different times and places, but can’t remember which was which later, we have a problem. So report them ASAP, before they get mixed up. You can also phone in the band number and details, so you don’t even need a stamp. If you want to keep the band to decorate a mounted bird, or to hang around a duck call
lanyard, simply be very certain to record the exact number on the band and then notify your nearest Fish & Game Council, which will ask you exactly when and where the bird was banded. In fact, in two separate instances I know of, we personally phoned back the hunters concerned to fi nd out just what their 14-year old paradise ducks tasted like.