EDIT: Everything is posted now, so I’ll respond to any questions I can answer for you now. Enjoy, and I hope you learn some new things!
Went to a bird banding event held by Wildlands Conservancy last night. Unfortunately this year has been a bit of a poor showing due to the warm weather, and we didn’t end up with any owls.
There was still a great presentation on the owls of Pennsylvania and the bird banding process. We did get to meet some of the educational owls and handle some nice examples of things being discussed.
I got some time to talk to the guy running the banding and the lady running the animal education part of things and got some of my questions answered. I’ve been becoming really interested in learning more of the regulatory side of things. There is a real web of agencies that govern how wildlife can be handled.
Here is a string of bands. I do have a big hand, but these bands were pretty small, as their goal was to band screech owls and saw whets, which are small owls.
A Screech Owl would probably be a bit larger than my fist, a Saw Whet is probably about the size of a more average fist.
The bands are made of aluminum, and you can see then stamped with serial numbers.
The small bands like these have ends that butt up together and aren’t crimped or fixed together since most birds can’t pull these off. Bands for eagles and other larger birds have crimps or bolts.