SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 
UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 
WASHINGTON, D. C. 20560 
4 
d uly 20, 1966 
/ 
Mrs. Herbert M. Church, Jr. 
Pacific Program,Room 601W 
Dear Jane: 
Your note about banding record errors brings up something that is my biggest 
problem-how to get them out of the records before the go back to D.C. In most 
cases I'm only partly successful. Normally what I do is check the records out for 
form and completeness. Then, if time permits, I go through them band by band and 
check original data. If I'm rushed as I was with the SIC 13 records then I don't check 
the original info as thoroughly. In the case of the 8IC 13 records only a few of the 
returns were written up when the trip returned and theye were done wrong and had ho be 
reworked. In their master banding book someone had written the ariiigat original info 
beside the bands and I used this in making the return sheets up - assuming that whoever 
had written the notations had looked them up correctly. This it seems, was a mistake. 
As it was I had to devoted about five or so evenings at home, plus part of a weekend, 
in order to get the returns done at the same time that trip parr preparations and a bunch 
of other things were going on. 
I suppose there isn't any way around checking each and every band for myself 
because you can't seem to rely on what someone else has scribbled down here and there. 
What we plan to do from now on is try to check records as soon as a trip returns and 
point out where errors have occurred bsadbc before the next trip leaves. The only problem 
being many trips return with records far from completion. 
The green memo books are also presenting more and more of a problem becaaase 
of either sloppiness or incompleteness, have issued a memo on the format to be 
followed in these books in xhk an effort to alleviate some of the confusion and 
errors that have occurred in the past. The memo books from SIC 13 were next to 
worthless because they ompfitted such a large number of things that it was impossible 
to trace down a number of the obvious mistakes (even ones dealing with original 
bandings). This was true especially in relation to the many recoveries made by the 
trip — when there was a notation in a book there was usually no band... ixstax 
in a number of instances where there were bands there was positively no mention of 
it anywhere, (as I found after frustrating hours of rooting and swearing). 
The one thing that worries me the most is the increasingly large number of 
birds that are being reported as one species that were originally reported as being 
another species* In several instances of this I have sent a letter directly back to 
the bander and recieved an answer stating that no birds of the original species had 
been handled so the band must be as reported, I donSt know how in the world we are 
going to resolve errors like this. All I am doing is keeping a record of these birds 
by writing on the interisland card or the banding card. Trips are also returning with 
high numbers of misread band numbers (ones that are obviously misread and ones that 
don't match anything.) An example of this can be found in the SI^ 13 master banding 
book on McKean Returns for 30 April 1966 8 complete numbers are given for Audubon's 
Shearwaters and three of them ard obviously misread. There were a number of other 
P ges with up to three misread numbers on them. For Sic 13 there were at least l£ 
misread numbers and k birds that were reported as being a different species from the 
