Hello Damien, First of all I agree with what you said in your latest post on Birding-aus , in particular the failure of recent governments in Australia (mainly Federal) to support science and the environment. We should all put our money where our mouth is and support AWC. However I would like to make the odd qualifier. I was a professional ornithologist and bird bander all of my working life – without bird banding (in particular individually colour-banded birds) we could not have carried out the research we did. During that time, and before when I was a teenager I also banded birds as an amateur in conjunction with many of the leading bird-banders of the era. I have been there and done that. I’ve also probably seen all the bad things – events that happened that may have been preventable with hindsight, but nobody’s perfect. About predators and mist nets. Such deaths are as you say avoidable by keeping a good lookout. People don’t! I have seen nets only checked once every half-hour. By and large I would say amateurs set as many nets as they can, because their measure of success is often how many birds they catch in a session. Overall in my experience I would estimate the death rate associated with mist netting as about 1%. All sorts of things happen – Brown Thornbills die in your hand (from shock) – predators ( Catbirds are the worst in rainforest) – I have known of nets left overnight accidentally containing dead birds the next morning – No 1 mist nets left too long can cause small birds to be so badly tangled that birds can barely fly when released – and finally poorly fitted bands can cause injury, not common but it happens. Many bird banders will deny any of this happens but they aren’t telling the truth – out in the bush there are no witnesses! Now about cannon nets. Wrongly set, or fired when the birds are in the wrong position, cannon nets behead birds. Fortunately few people do and the experts will have learnt by experience, Having to house and process a large number birds in hot weather is a very difficult undertaking. By and large I don’t know what the death rate would be, but rest assured there would be one. People are reluctant to report or even talk about this sort of thing. The big question is whether in the name of science, is it worth it? I believe it is so long as it really is science and not just weekend entertainment. Compared with loss of habitat, introduced predators including man, climate change and all the other variables, the negatives of bird banding are a drop in the ocean. Regards Graeme Chapman ( graemechapman.com.au)
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Graeme, Great post and thanks for contributing. I agree that there is great variance in how responsible different banders are. This is largely what prompted my original support for this debate because I really think that i) banders should frequently reflect on what they are achieving and what their motivations are for doing what they do, and ii) because I actually think that the system should include some re-evaluation of projects and even licenses. A great deal of importance is placed on initial training, but far less on maintaining best practices. Most importantly though, I also believe that most birds that are caught in mist-nets are done so as part of active research (here I say birds caught rather than bands used, because these projects often have reasonably high recapture rates). In these studies, every individual is invaluable, and when you’ve waited 5 years for a particular bird to mature and start providing some reproductive data, you’ll gladly spend the extra time watching nets rather than having a cuppa. I’d probably agree with an estimate of a 1% death rate. However, to put that into context, all animal testing (such as for medical trials – the only research our government seems to be interested in funding) has 100% death rate. But, more seriously, this is in line with other animal research (e.g. mammals http://goo.gl/ihGnVt), and is about at the acceptable rate for animal ethics committees (typically 0.5-2% in my experience). Less seriously (perhaps) is that this is a drop in the ocean compared to how many chickens are alive at any one time and awaiting slaughter (estimated around 19 billion).
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