Scientific bird banding

In the past, long before the girdling of birds, the Greeks thought that birds hid underground to spend the winter and, although it sounds crazy, the truth is that it is quite logical: amphibians, reptiles, mammals and even some as big as bears, winter underground, why not the birds they saw disappearing in summer?

Over the centuries, several theories appeared, from that they flew out to sea or even that they flew to the Moon, but all of them could be summarized very easily: they had no idea where those birds that they only saw in summer went. The answer to that question came very unexpectedly. In 1822, a white stork was hunted in Germany. Turns out he had an arrow embedded in his neck from central Africa. This fact made it possible to demonstrate something that is now evident to us, that storks, among many other birds, spend the winter in Africa. Scientific bird banding works in a very similar way, marking a bird in such a way that if it is seen or captured you can know where it comes from and the places it has passed through.

Ringing appeared in Denmark in 1899, by H. Christian C. Mortensen, where starlings began to be marked with aluminum rings on which the name of the ringer and its address could be read, so that, if someone recovered one, they could get in touch. It currently operates in a regulated manner. In the European Union, it is illegal to capture wild birds, and banding is an exception that can only be done by trained and accredited persons.

Ringing offices and endorsing entities

The birds are caught with harmless methods or when they are chickens in the nest, and a small metal ring is attached to them. In this way, if the bird is caught again or is collected after its death, we can know its origin and deduce the migratory route it has followed.

Today in Spain, there are four ring offices, which guard and manage their data banks, provide the ringers with their return address and issue the certificates that guarantee the banding machine to the Administrations that grant the banding permits. They are the Aranzadi Science Society, the Spanish Ornithological Society, the Office of Migratory Species (Min. Med. Amb) and the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences/ICO. So much SEO, like Aranzadi And ICO, are themselves endorsing entities, they are responsible for forming ringers, organizing banding projects, and endorsing, as their name suggests, the training of a ringer before the ringing office with which they work. Apart from these three already mentioned, endorsing entities (but not ring offices) are the Doñana Biological Station — CSIC, and the Grup Balear d'Ornithology and Defense of Nature.

The banding process must ensure, above all, the safety and well-being of the bird to be handled. It must be a quick process, but well executed, so that the animal suffers as little as possible, and is released as soon as possible.

Types of rings

In All The ringed birds, we will always see one metal ring (each species has a predetermined measure), which is what individualizes it and separates it from the others, as a “DNI”. On this metal ring, you can always find the code (ring model and identification number) plus the sender.

These species that only have metal rings, which are usually mainly the group of passerines, need to recapture the specimen in order to be able to read the ring and report this capture to the original ringing office, and this, in turn, to the responsible ringer or ringer.

Optionally, you can place colored rings/flags, rings or flags for remote reading, necklaces, nasal plates, wing panels, etc.

Both these last color-coded rings, and the remote reading rings that we will see below, are usually placed on large birds, which are not going to be able to be recaptured, so a remote reading of a sequence of colors, or an alphanumeric code, is required in order to report the sighting.

How can I help if I see a ringed bird?

If we locate a color-coded or remotely readable ring, and we are able to read it, the next step is to report it. To do this, there are different ways and places to do it. In the case of vultures, for example, the ideal is to write to EBD (Doñana Biological Station), but for example in the case of cranes, there is the ICORA. For other projects with remote reading rings and other special marks, there is the page CR Birding, in which you can enter both the species and the type of brand, and it refers you to the European project from which it comes, so that you can now contact the person responsible directly.

In the previous photograph, we can see that, once the ring has been reported and received, it is stored in a database, in this case the EBD, and is added to the bird's history. In the upper part, among other things, you can see the code of the ring, the date, the location where it was ringed and the age of the bird, in this case a chicken in the nest. Below, we have the history ordered by sightings. Attach the date, place, observer, the kilometers traveled and the days apart.

We attach another example, in this case, a flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus) with a white remote reading ring, with black letters (LW2) that we see in the lagoons of Alcázar de San Juan.

What is ring good for?

In short, scientific fencing of birds is an essential technique for understanding migratory routes, aspects of their biology (molting, reproduction, feeding, etc.), land use and the state of conservation of our bird species. Nowadays, there are much more advanced techniques, such as GPS devices, which transmit to us the exact positions of the marked bird at all times. But scientific ringing is infinitely more accessible and cheaper, and it can provide us with data that a GPS device cannot because of its short lifespan, such as the longevity of the individual in question. Fortunately, there are more and more eyes on the field, and, therefore, more reading and information.

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