Every bird caught gets a ring.
Unless of course, they already have one. In which case, the bird banders from Rocky Point Bird Observatory (RPBO) will be delighted to see them return because it means nothing has drastically changed in that bird's life.
"That's exactly how I got hooked in bird banding," says Ann Nightingale, migration project coordinator. "I was visiting the banding station and they took a bird out of the bag and it already had a band on it. It was a fox sparrow and it had come back to the station every year, for four years.
"Every fall, it came back to the station," Nightingale recalls, "and it changed the way I thought about birds in the environment."
But what blew the coordinator's mind was how that bird who has wings and could theoretically fly anywhere, was coming through the same 100-metre-wide strip year after year every time it migrated south.
"What happens if," she added concernedly, "something changes in that strip; if we cut down the trees or when there's fire?"
This is exactly the reason why individual birds are banded.
Understanding their movements in breeding sites, migratory pathways and wintering areas can help in conservation efforts.
The proof is in the ring, or the band which is typically made of aluminum.
It's used to identify and keep track of individual birds by putting it around one of their legs.
Think of it as like a licence plate on a car where each aluminum band is engraved with a unique set of numbers. They come in different sizes, too.
Bird banding is the practice of safely applying a band or tag to part of the bird, usually the leg, for data collection and individual identification.
Nightingale orders the bands from the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) which only issues them to people who either have a station permit or a master permit for a research project.
The bands come to the CWS from the U.S. Geological Survey so that all the birds in North America have the same series of bands so that when one shows up somewhere else, they can correlate when and where it was banded.
Tracking banded birds in North America is jointly administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey and Canadian Wildlife Survey.
Bird banding at Pedder Bay Marina
Volunteers at RPBO have been hard at work banding birds since July 21 as part of their songbird or passerine migration monitoring and northern saw-whet owl monitoring programs.
Their site at Pedder Bay Marina follows a standardized banding station protocol that strictly requires a licensed bander to be on-site at all times. It's tightly regulated ensuring bird safety is a priority.
Lightweight mist nets are hung in 15 locations around the monitoring site that's approximately 0.05 square-kilometres or about 10 times as big as a football field. These nets are placed in a bird's flight path making it easy to capture and remove them for banding.
Just before sunrise volunteers arrive at the station to prepare for the day's catch. They do this seven days a week and about six hours each day.
Putting the band on does not hurt the bird
Some of the tools they use are specifically designed for banding birds, like the pliers that have holes in them so the bird's leg does not get crushed when they put it on.
When a bird is removed from the mist net, it's put into a clean bird bag and brought back to the banding station. Each bird gets a fresh bag and nothing is reused until they are washed for the next round.
While in the bag, the bird is weighed and its fat score checked. Fat scores are a visual estimation of the amount of fat and can be seen when a bird bander softly blows the feather at the top of the bird's breast just above the clavicles. The fat appears yellow or pinkish-yellow and is an indicator of health.
"For most of us we think of fat as a bad thing," shared Nightingale. "For birds, it's actually a good thing. If you're migrating, you need the fat because you're going to fly maybe two or three hundred kilometres in a night, so you need to have some resources on board if you're going to do that."
They also measure the wings, check the eye colour and enter them into a database in a computer. Once all these are recorded, the bird gets a band and is then set free.
At the station, they also have a bird first aid kit, in case they need to treat some injuries.
According to David Bell, a licensed bird bander with RPBO, they have caught about 55 species in the nets so far this season, and observed around 120 at the Pedder Bay site.
"We catch around 3,200 birds in an average season at Pedder Bay," Bell said. "Typically the last two weeks of September are the busiest for songbirds, and the first two weeks of October are the busiest for owls.
RPBO's songbird migration project ends on Oct. 18, but their work continues at night until the end of the month monitoring the northern saw-whet owls.
According to RPBO, as of 2023 they have banded and collected data on 14,490 northern saw-whet owls, giving them an insight into their population cycles and health.
On Oct. 6, they banded their 300th owl at the Rocky Point station; and 231 at the Pedder Bay station.
“We approach this as a privilege and something that we want to do with the birds' health and safety in mind,” Nightingale says.
"Yes, we do catch them just briefly and do the work that we do and send them on their way, and we hope that we'll see them again."
