I appreciate the arguments for banding and admire the work of
the Wader Study Groups and Clive Minton (one of the many
contributors to the Bayside Friends of Native Wildlife
database!).
But I would like to see the AWSG's reactions to the recent
postings from Jon Hall and Frank O'Connor.
As far as I can reason, Jon's argument about bands being an
indicator of age starts off OK but fails without some supporting
stats on banded and unbanded birds. Do the WSG's use a
randomised-control method for choosing which birds to flag ? (If
not they have no "defence" to the recent hypothesis on
Birding-Aus that Russian shooters, Snowy Owls, Yarkurts, foxes
discriminate between banded and unbanded birds).
Frank's remarks about the value of flags are fine but simply do
not address the problem posed by "Beswick" (his term - but close
to a great one in the history of ornithology), ie. do birds
feeding on kelp/strandline algae suffer with flags. All the
research I've read is about birds feeding on sandflats.
I think - and am open to being dissuaded - that this debate is a
sort of denial of "collateral damage", which I accept in
relation to control of rabbits and foxes ... and even humans.
Michael Norris
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
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