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Banding Birds in the 1700s
Art
The brass band in the hat depicted here reads “1764,” and it will encircle the leg of the Gray Heron (Ardea cinerea), the European form of North America’s Great Blue Heron (A. herodias). The modern banding of birds dates back to the success in 1710, when a Gray Heron bearing several bands—one from Turkey, more than 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) away—was recovered by a falconer in Germany. Eighteen years later, in 1728, the band that Duke Ferdinand had wrapped around the leg of a bird back in 1669 or so was re- covered. In North America the first known band- ing occurred in 1803. The next year John James Audubon found two phoebes near Philadelphia bearing the silver cord he had tied to their legs the previous year, when they were still in their nest. (The banded nestling phoebes—called Peewee Flycatchers in Audubon’s day—became special friends of Audubon’s; he frequently visited them while courting Lucy Bakewell, later his wife.) These isolated incidents were among the first faltering steps toward using a monitoring technique that took a century to catch on but eventually be- came a worldwide activity. Today thousands of serious students of bird biology participate in banding, and it contributes substantially to our knowledge about birds.77
Although this painting was produced more than a century after the oldest metal banding recorded—an event that occurred in France, around 1595, when one of Henry IV’s Peregrine Falcons was recovered 1,350 miles (2,170 kilometers) away from where it had been banded— it predates widespread banding
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