HOUSE AND GARDEN | 
July, 1913 
12 
thought to interest in the bird banding movement a 
woman whom he had known for a long time. He had 
said only a few words when the lady remarked: 
“I have seen you annoy the poor birds by allowing 
the lens of vour camera to glare at them; by flashing 
light from a mirror upon their nests to secure pictures; 
and by taking the baby birds from their cradles to pose 
them on a twig—and now you come with some nezu 
terror!” 
But this is not so; the woman's imagination could not 
have gone wider of the mark. The aluminum rings or 
bands that are being placed on wild birds are not noticed 
any more by the wearers of them than chickens or 
pigeons mind their anklets, and this means that with the 
possible exception of the first few minutes the presence 
of the band is dismissed from the bird’s thoughts. Mr. 
Ernest Harold Baynes, whose nature articles have ap¬ 
peared from time to time in this magazine, writes that 
a chickadee, caught and banded by him while the bird 
was at a food station in winter, simply flew to a tree 
after the operation, cocked his head to one side, pecked 
feebly once or twice at the ornament on his leg and then 
proceeded about his business as if nothing out of the 
ordinary had taken place. The bands are made in a 
number of different sizes, those for the warblers and 
other small birds being very tiny and dainty, while those 
if ever, for the big birds are proportionately larger. 
The secret of the whole system lies in the inscription 
“notify am museum n y” and the serial number which 
appear on each band. This insures the probability of hearing 
from every person into whose hands a banded or marked bird 
happens to fall. Curiosity is a mighty force, and a man coming 
upon a bird wearing 
an inscribed alumi¬ 
num ring is over¬ 
come by the same 
desire that seizes 
upon the beach 
comber who chances 
to pick up a bottle 
containing a note 
written by a person 
in a distant country 
— the passion to 
communicate with 
the sender of the 
message pre¬ 
dominates in both. 
And thus it is that 
some sixty birds out 
of a total of slightly 
over two thousand 
banded in North 
America during the 
past five years have 
already been heard 
from. Some were 
shot, some killed by 
cats, some found 
dead, one caught by 
a butcher-bird, an¬ 
other drowned in a The brown thrasher is an example of perch¬ 
watering tank, a few ing birds whose young are readily banded 
were caught alive 
and released again, and so forth. But in not one of these in¬ 
stances had the tiny band on the bird’s leg been instrumental in 
bringing about the death or capture of the bird, for in not a 
Banded and ready to be put back in the hollow tree. The bird seldom, 
notices the little aluminum ring upon its leg 
timacy with them and notwithstanding the manner in which we 
are wont to parade our knowledge of their body structure, life 
histories, and so on — in spite of this, there exists a large number 
of questions concerning the every-day lives of our wild birds, 
about which definite information is as lacking as it is with regard 
to the meaning of life itself. No one, not even the most dis¬ 
tinguished naturalist, can tell you, for instance, how consistently 
a given pair of birds goes back year after year to the same nest¬ 
ing site. A certain niche in a stone bridge may be occupied by 
pboebes for twenty-five or 
fifty years with hardly a 
skip, but who knows how the 
tenancy might change and 
shift during such a term of 
years? Or who can tell the 
average normal life period 
of a phoebe, a robin or a 
wren? Common birds, all 
three, but how little have we 
penetrated their common se¬ 
crets ! These problems and 
others cannot always remain 
unsolved, however, for the 
banding of numbers of wild 
birds has already cast a ray 
of light on certain phases of 
the movements of individual 
birds, and this is the mission 
of the bird banders. 
Let us first understand 
what is the nature of this 
bird banding, for without 
understanding we are apt to 
be skeptical and even critic¬ 
al. A friend of mine, for 
example, who has for many 
Does this same swallow return year years been a keen bird stu- 
after year to the same box? dent and photographer, 
