108 
THE WILSON BULLETIN— June, 1922 
BIRD BANDING DEPARTMENT 
Under the Direction of Wm. I. Lyon, Waukegan, III. 
THE EARLY HISTORY OP BIRD BANDING IN AMERICA 
LEOX J. COLE, DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, 
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, WISCONSIN 
There has recently been a great revival and extension of interest in 
bird banding in this country, and I presume it is because of this that I 
have been asked to prepare a brief account of the early efforts along this 
line. Since the chief outlines of this history have already been published 
on several occasions there would be no object in repeating them. There 
is, however, a more intimate and personal history connected with the 
early endeavors to establish bird banding as a systematic method of bird 
study which may not be without interest to the considerable numbers 
who are interested in the undertaking at this time, even though it may 
not add anything essential to what has already been written. This is my ex- 
CDse, therefore, if the present account appears to be more a personal nar- 
rative of some of the early struggles, discouragements and successes than 
a connected history of the bird-banding movement in this country. For 
the same reason, I shall not consider the independent development of the 
study of birds by this method in several Enropean countries. This is 
essentially an account of the beginnings and early days of the American 
Bird Banding Association, the functions of which have lately been so 
happily taken over and are being so effectively prosecuted by the Bureau 
of Biological Survey. 
Sporadic attempts to mark birds in one way or another, in order to 
determine whether they returned to the localities in which they were 
originally marked, have undoubtedly long been made. We know that 
Andiibon made one such successful experiment, and game birds partic- 
ularly have occasionally been banded or tagged in some way by individ- 
ual hunters or by sporting clubs. Such efforts were, however, usually 
purely local in their scope, the marks affording no means of identifica- 
tion to anyone except those who did the banding, and hence yielded no 
“ returns ” unless the birds chanced to be recaptured in the localities in 
which they were marked. The first systematic attempts in this country, 
so far as I know, to secure wider cooperation by having a return ad- 
dress on the bands, were those of Mr. Taverner, then at Detroit, and of 
Dr. Bartsch at Washington. Although both of these ornithologists worked 
on a relatively small scale and for a limited period, they secured re- 
sults sufficient to demonstrate the value of the method. 
^Cole, L. J., The tagging of wild birds as a means of studying their 
movements. Auk, Vol. XXVI, 1909, pp. 137-143; Cole, L. J., The tagging 
of wild birds: Reports of progress in 1909, Auk, Vol. XXVII, 1910, pp. 
153-168; Cleaves, H. H., What the American Bird Banding Association 
has accomplished during 1912, Auk, Vol. XXX, 1913, pp. 248-261; Lincoln, 
F. C., The history and purposes of bird banding. Auk, Vol. XXXVIII, 
1921, pp. 217-228. 
