Walking in circles all day. That's the
basis of bird banding. We set up loops of trails in the forest,
studded by ten 12m-long, extremely soft and nearly invisible nets
(hence the name mist-net), and walk them every 40 minutes. The paths
become apparent even after a few days, leaves and little saplings
pressed into earth, soil compacted beneath. The banding trails at
Point Reyes Bird Observatory in California, where I conducted my
training, have been walked by interns for 30 years, and look more
like canals than footpaths: deep, smooth earthen trenches dug by
boots and rain out of the forest floor.
As birds are flying along, minding
their own business, they might suddenly feel a peculiar but
insurmountable horizontal gravity. The nets are made of thread,
basically – loose mesh diamonds of black thread that flutter
slightly in the breeze. When a bird flies into one, he or she sort of
somersaults into a pocket of mesh and then, confused by this sudden
change in trajectory and paralysis, struggles and gets itself tangled
just enough to be unable to flap back out. Usually the head, if its
small enough, and one or both “wrists” get looped and then it's
stuck until we come along to liberate it. But it doesn't see us that
way. It thinks we want to eat it, and so struggles some more in an
attempt to save its own skin, usually making our job harder. It takes
a lot of training to understand and practice the fastest, safest ways
to extract tangled birds. After awhile it seems as easy as taking a
cardigan off a small child. Every once in awhile, they are so tangled
no amount of training can help you. Then you use scissors. I have yet
to need scissors. I hope I never need to.
Wattled Honeyeater in net
Different species react differently to
being in the nets and being handled. Warblers and small hawks tend to
go comatose – just sort of lying there, barely tangled – and
extracting them is like picking a spoon out of the utensil drawer.
Chickadees are tiny and ferocious, thrashing and spinning into
anarchic balls of yarn, screwing their eyes shut with the effort.
Most banders loathe trying to undo the chaos they cause. Woodpeckers
use their tools against you, thwarting your efforts by drumming any
inch of your flesh they can aim at with their pick-ax bills. I saw a
master bander come back from the net with a Pileated Woodpecker
muzzled by a Pringles can, his hands streaming with blood. His own
blood; leaking from a hundred puncture wounds. Most of the time, its
a swift procedure, a minute or less, plus another to take some
measurements, jot some notes, and they are back on the wing.
As a banding technician in American Samoa,
what strikes my heart with anxiety is finding a Samoan Starling in
the net. They look very much like smallish crows: dark with large
bills and calculating eyes. As soon as they see you
approaching, they start screaming. Ear-splitting shrieks from the
moment you arrive until the moment you let them go. And they are
occasionally “tongued”, which is as bad as it sounds. Their
tongue is shaped like an arrowhead, and they somehow get a few
threads looped around the back points, then they grab a handful of
net with their sharp talons and pull, sometimes until their tongue
bleeds. And then as you try to undo them, they bite, jab, and stab at
all your most vulnerable parts – in between thumb and forefinger,
the wrinkles above your knuckles, the flesh alongside your nails, and
especially wounds from previous starling encounters, over and over
and over. And if they get a good grip, they thrash their heads from
side to side like a prize bass, trying to rip the skin right off your
fingers. It's as if they want to take vengeance for all the birds who
have ever been banded, for all the inconvenience and confusion humans
have enacted on all avian species in the name of conservation.
Samoan Starling mugshot
Remember, they are also screaming this
entire time, even with a mouthful of your flesh and a bleeding
tongue. It's traumatizing for everyone involved. And every time, it
makes me wonder. Why the hell am I doing this? Why are scientists
harassing birds, interrupting their already stressful lives, just to
give them an identification number in case we get the chance to
harass them again? As an intern last fall, jarringly presented with
the dichotomous nature of wildlife-handling, I asked this question
again and again: asked my trainer, asked the scientific literature,
asked my soul.
Maybe growing up in the suburbs,
sheltered from lions and wolves and anacondas, surrounded by my
cherished and ever-growing plush menagerie, led me to believe that
animals are soft (many are, incredibly) and that touching animals was
a way to connect with them. Raising pets teaches us that animals
enjoy being scratched and patted and belly-rubbed. Children instigate
formative emotional bonds with nature by snatching small snakes and
lizards out of the grass and feeling them wriggle free from their
grasp. Being human with hands that hold and caress and nurture, I
instinctively want to use my uniquely nimble appendages to calm small
creatures in their moments of terror, to hug them and tell them
everything's going to be alright. But the truth is, as a scientist, I
am causing those moments of terror. And the very last thing that will
comfort them is being touched by me. To them, I am no different than
any other predator that wants to rip them into bite-sized pieces.
It's a heart-breaking realization, the power-balance so repulsively
tipped that it wrenches any magic I anticipated out of such an
intimate encounter. It makes me feel content to bridge the space
between myself and wild animals only optically, through binoculars.
The main objectives of MAPS banding
programs (Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship) such as the
one we are flagshipping on Ofu-Olosega, are thus: to provide annual
estimates of adult population size and survivorship, proportion of
resident individuals in a population, recruitment of hatch-year birds
into the population (AKA survival of their first harrowing year), and
population growth rate using mark-recapture data of adult birds. If
that sounds like a lot of jargon to you, it basically translates to
learning whether adults or juveniles are surviving, so researchers
can further hypothesize about specific threats effecting the
population. For example, if it seems like there are less Cerulean
Warblers than there used to be, is it because something is causing
massive nest failure or keeping young birds from surviving their
first year, but the current generation of adults are doing fine? Or
is there something more overarching that is killing off adults as
well? Are they returning from their wintering grounds? Are nearby
populations doing similarly or is the trend specific to this portion
of habitat?
Long before the MAPS program was
established, people were watching birds. And counting them. The
Breeding Bird Survey and Christmas Bird Count exemplify programs that
have been estimating bird populations for decades, and it would seem
the information gleaned from this data would be sufficient to
understand bird population trends over time. Because of them, for
instance, we know for sure that aside from a few species that adapt
well to human-created environments (if you're not a birder, these are
the birds you probably see the most of: species that love cities and
suburbs as much as we do), birds are on the decline across North
America. The major threats to birds last century were over-hunting
and specific toxins such as DDT leaching into the environment. Thanks
to management strategies and wildlife refuges, hunting is less of a
problem, at least in the US, and the EPA removed DDT from production.
But the last 50 years added climate change, invasive species, and
rapid habitat loss to the list. I've always hated that term –
habitat loss – as if we simply couldn't find it, though we swear it
was around here somewhere. Although, maybe that describes the
phenomenon perfectly – a forest is cleared for a suburban
development, a few old residents are devastated as they witness a
drop off in biodiversity, and the new ones, growing up in the streets
named for the trees they replaced, have no recollection of what they
are missing.
Anyway, we know birds are declining.
Not just the Passenger Pigeon, whose populations were so mythic in
proportion we have all heard the stories yet have a hard time
imagining it now – flocks streaming across the countryside so thick
they blotted out the sun for hours. Now there are none. Older
generations, who spent more time outdoors, will tell you they've
noticed a lack – it just seems quieter out there these days.
Counting birds lets us know that what the old timers say is true, but
it doesn't provide the answers why. Setting up nets and catching
individual birds, giving them nearly weightless identification
bracelets, and sending them back into the wild, provides a deeper
glimpse into their lives.
But it's still just a glimpse.
Recapture rates are abysmally small – ranging from 1 to 30%,
depending on the banding station. Some stations, especially
breeding-focused MAPS stations, host a lot of resident, non-migratory
birds that are recaptured many times a season. Others, such as fall
migration stations, are located along migratory pathways and catch
birds who come through once a year and might never return.
Additionally, each station is only a few hundred square meters of
reality – a tiny porthole into the vast tanker of nature. But
tracking the individuals we do recapture tells us who is surviving,
and who is returning to their breeding grounds. Sometimes banders
even pull one feather or take a tiny drop of blood and send it to a
lab for analysis. This is how researchers have tracked a wide variety
of data from migration paths, to genetic variation informing changes
in the taxonomic order, to the spread of introduced illnesses like
West Nile Virus in some North American species, and Avian Malaria in
Hawaii. It sounds invasive, but after decades of banding birds of all
sizes, scientists know that the few minutes of confusion and stress
that banding causes birds has minimal effect on their livelihoods.
Backyard banding was a hobby in the
early 20th century, but now banding operations are
strictly regulated and conducted only by trained and permitted
researchers, always with the safety of the birds taking precedence
over data. The injury and fatality rate is less than 1%. Accidents do
happen, and I have witnessed both irreversible damage and the
miraculous – I once recaptured a healthy adult bird with a slightly
crooked leg, looked up his stats in the database, and found his leg
had been broken during banding several years before, splinted and
taped before he was released. It clearly healed and he has been doing
fine ever since. Even the Samoan Starlings seem to fair well after
having their tongues lacerated – their ferocity reflects their
tenacity. And thinking about it, I suppose my tongue heals pretty
quickly after biting it, too. Some individuals are recaptured over
and over and over throughout their lives, and because of it,
researchers know that the process has little effect on their
livelihood and have even illuminated lifespan records for many
species.
MAPS stations across the continent (and
on Ofu-Olosega) also conduct habitat surveys in conjunction with
banding to link population trends with changes in habitat quality.
Birds cannot exist alone in the sky: they rely on evolutionarily
specific environments in which to hide from predators, find food, and
build nests. The data gathered by annual banding stations contributes
to land management and conservation strategies, as well as evaluating
the success of implemented strategies in real time. At least, that's
what I've been told by my supervisors and the scientific literature.
I have yet to witness a specific example, but I am still freshman in
the school of bird banding.
All of this is what I try to tell
myself when I find a Samoan Starling caught in a net by his tongue,
and spend minutes drenched in sweat, struggling to free him while he
pummels my hands with his knife-bill, screaming until I want to
scream myself. All the feel-goodie conservation stuff gets flushed
from my psyche when I suspect injury in the bird I am handling. When
I suspect my good intentions have caused grave consequences for the
very thing I am trying to “save”. It makes me sick to my stomach
and declare this to be the last banding job I ever sign up for. It
makes me think the whole thing is a farce, that biologists don't gain
any vital information from all those numbers, that its just an excuse
to hold a beautiful, wild creature in your hand while you take a
selfie that you can post online when you get back to civilization. It
makes me think science is too focused on the species at the expense
of the individual. Even the terminology is suspect – birds are not
just banded, they are “processed”, like a cut of meat in a
factory. It starts to feel like modern conservation is relegated to
deciding between the lesser of two evils: invasive intervention or
environmental destruction. My erupting emotions make me want to drop
out of banding academy altogether. I return to our field house in the afternoon with heavy heart and a knot in my stomach.
And then a few days later, we catch a
Fruit Dove. A resplendent, shining piece of feathered rainbow, a male
Purple-capped Fruit Dove lay docile in the net after a whole morning
of empties. My heart fluttered with excitement as I carefully removed
netting from his magenta-lidded face. His eyes were bright and clear
and somehow reminiscent of dinosaurs resurrected in our collective
memory by Jurassic Park. His underbelly pulsed with all the hues of
the most vibrant sunset you've ever seen – fiery orange, lemon
yellow, flamboyant fuchsia, moody burgundy – as refreshing as a
sno-cone in the dog days of summer. His only expression of discomfort
while I held him for banding were his toes clenched tightly around
each other – like the hands of a worried little monk clasped
beneath his cloaksleeves. He never struggled, never bit or clawed
out, never uttered a peep. And he smelled so wondrously sweet like
flowers, I wanted to bury my nose in his soft plumage forever. Then
we sent this rainbow back into the sky where he belonged, his wing
beats strong and thrumming with wild vitality.
And I realized: I am sucker for this
banding stuff after all. Many young scientists, including myself, are
at least partly drawn to banding birds by the fleeting moment you get
to hold a vibrating piece of wilderness in your hand then send it on
its way. And for many, even and especially veterans, the motivation
to continue is fueled by the desire to understand and conserve.
Science claims to liberate itself from human bias, but what human
activity isn't at least motivated by our fickle emotions? Emotions
that cascade into opinions and passions but also action,
determination, discovery. If the data collected really can help
ensure the abundance of these gorgeous, mysterious, even ferocious
creatures into the future, then maybe it is worth a few moments of
discomfort – the birds' and my own. Maybe. I'm still not sure.
Anyway, I still have two more months of walking in circles to decide.
