Scott Ray:
>That must be some banding site. Where a hawk is caught, banded, and
>released every 3.6 minutes in a 18 our work day! How many banding stations
>are there?

It's more like a 10 hour day, actually, by mid-September. Takes a while
to set up in the morning (not to mention niceties like breakfast), and
as these are hawks, which roost rather than migrate at night, we do try
and toss 'em with an hour or so of light left at the end of the day.
And we, too, have things to do before dark, like roll nets and feed
lure birds before they roost (pigeons don't eat in the dark).

We had five stations last year, are going to experiment with six this
year. The major portion of the daily flight occurs in about a four
hour window. When I run a blind, my best sustained rate for trapping,
banding, and releasing has been 25/hr for 3.5 hours. That was mostly
two trappers, one bander, and one person who'd never been there before
pressed into service to record banding data, though we eventually did
get a helper to empty nets and to band baby sharpies with minimal
measurements taken (we have well over 10,000 baby sharpies banded over the
life of the project). The three of us who did most of the work
that day, though, were all very, very experienced (we ended up banding
113 that day, which gives you some idea of how much slower things are
before/after the "mid-morning rush"). Banded 60 sharpies - one adult,
59 kids, that day!

When things do get very, very busy we drop measurements, particularly
caliper measurements that take time to do right, and run two banding
lines with one person to write data, if we have sufficient crew.

We concentrate on volume primarily because of our low rate of return,
just slightly under 1% of the birds we band.


- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>