I want to thank Tony for pointing out another problem with banding. I will make this my last tweet on the subject. My first post was about dippers that I have been watching for 16 months and I was trying to state me feelings. My second was a "Glen Beck" like fear mongering, and the reason I did that was because everyone who responded said the same thing, that banding was doing no harm to the birds and I responded the same way back to them, with unfounded facts. There were a few people that I have started a dialog with that is very constructive. But there were also people who tried to bully and threaten me.

My third post, I had to do a lot of searching to find information on the negative side of banding, it just is not reported, but what I found was serious, if any of you looked at the one blog of "winterwoman", it seems to be just fun and games for her. She talks of how they caught a sparrow, banded it, took its vitals and released it, but they forgot to weight it so they captured it again just to weight it, and then she and her friends had rhubarb cobbler, that is clearly a bad banding group. But it also brought more bullying.

That post also got some people to email me personally and tell me they are against banding too, but they did not want to go on record, because they are afraid of how the militant banders attack. One even asked me to post the quotes and the links I found to the list serve he belongs to, in another state, because he knew I was already taking some heat and he didn't want any from his local banders.

I do think there was a time when banding was very helpful, but technology has come a long way. Since 1902, when banding birds began, more than 63,000,000 birds have been banded, but only 3,500,000 (5%) have been recovered and reported to the banding offices.

The End.

About My Dippers:

The dippers I have been watching, I now wish, that when I started I had thought to identify them with my pictures, I am now. I knew for certain that I had the same female as last year, because she is using the same nest. During winter the parents left the area, and one of the young stayed around for the winter. I cannot be certain, other than it was a juvenile, because I was not paying proper attention to my pictures. If it were banded then I would be certain that it was the son of the adult couple. But, it also was not important to me, I can make that assumption.
When the first couple came back the male chased away the young male, but the youngster had been courting a mate, so the elder male took on the second female as a mate. It took me a while to figure out I was looking at one male and two females, if they were banded it would have been easier, but I still figured out that I was watching a polygamist male. I recorded him rebuilding the first nest with the first female, and then watched him help the second female build a new nest a few hundred yards away.

As dippers look so much alike it is hard to figure out who is who, but now that I am viewing my pictures closer I know who I am looking at now. When you get pictures of them copulating it is easy to identify the male. As of now there are two hatchlings in the first nest. Yesterday at 1:29 PM an egg shell was tossed out of the nest, and this morning there was a second shell when I got there. This clutch is almost two weeks earlier than the first one last year.

The male is spending most of his time at the first nest, and taking some food into the nest, but the female is doing most of the work right now. She spends about an hour in the nest, comes out bathes and feeds herself and makes a couple trips into the nest with food, then stays for another hour. The male is spending very little time at the second nest, the female has stayed in the nest and rarely comes out, she maybe a first timer. He hangs outside the second nest for several minutes goes inside for a brief minute and then heads back to the first nest. If both broods succeed he will be very busy soon.

I will be keeping My Dipper thread going for several weeks and I hope you all find it pleasing, educational, and less controversial.

Don