Bird Bands

Just a note to encourage anyone who gets an image of a banded bird to make a report. Sometimes they can get the band attributed even without quite the full number.

This was brought to mind because one swan in a flock that I photographed in the Klamath basin had a neck band. My wife is a bander, so she took it upon herself to report it and a few weeks later I received a nice thank-you from the Bird Banding Lab.

Oops! Forgot the url: www.reportband.gov

Have fun out there.

Here's the certificate I received via email. Fun stuff.

Congrats on this find and your follow up, Dennis. This is interesting to see where the swan had originally been banded and now where you'd taken this photo at.

As a side note; I'm always on the lookout for desert tortoises when I'm out and about in the deserts of So Cal. I have an app on my iPhone for tracking their whereabouts. The app is used to take a photo of the tortoise which then supplies the GPS location back to the tracking groups.

That is really interesting to get that information back from them, and to see where the bird was banded. Wow, he is a long way from home. Sure would be interesting to know what flight paths he has used over the years.

An update: My wife ended up having some correspondence with Susan Savage, the bander of this swan. It turns out these neck bands must attract attention. It's been sighted and reported to Susan at least 55 times since it was banded (compare this with song birds where you're lucky to get a few reports per hundred bandings). She's already gotten another report on it from considerably further north since I saw it.