All the data in the world amounts to nothing if it can't be translated into
something tangible in terms of helping to preserve birds under threat. I
re-iterate: we have collected enough information to know that many species on
the Asian flyways are under severe pressure. I don't know exactly what we
should be doing, but interminable banding seems to be, to me, akin to Nero
fiddling while Rome burns...
On 24/02/2013, at 7:05 PM, Allan Richardson <> wrote:
> While it is true that banding has been undertaken for many years, there still
> remains many questions that only banding can answer - for instance local
> movements within estuaries after birds have settled into the summer or winter
> estuary of their choice.
>
> We all know our estuaries are constantly under development pressure and key
> to being able to make strong cases for bird conservation is knowing how they
> use a specific estuary and what areas are important to them. Banding can play
> an important role in identifying where cohorts within an estuary's migratory
> flock go, or if some birds are outside current niche knowledge and require
> additional survey work find unknown roosting or foraging sites.
>
> The other point perhaps that should be made about the long-term nature of
> banding studies is that, due to pressures coming to bear across borders
> throughout the flyway, the niches of the birds are constantly changing. We
> all know the pressures birds are forced to bear: due to outright loss of
> habitat, increased habitat pressure from human activities, climate change
> affecting prey species and a whole host of other pressures that are pertinent
> to specific habitat areas and/or others that we may not know about yet.
>
> In a changing world banding and radio-tracking work, are some of the
> techniques that allow us to keep our finger on the pulse of how pressure on
> bird habitat is changing their movements, affecting their weight (a measure
> of habitat quality declines in some cases), longevity, fecundity and of
> course reactions to stochastic events - to name only a small amount of the
> data that can only be sourced by capturing and recapturing birds.
>
> It is not perfect I agree, we would all love to be able to just watch birds
> and not lay a hand on them, but managing populations is hard enough with the
> relatively small amounts of data that are coming through from banding (only a
> small percentage of the birds we see in the Hunter estuary have bands
> attached). Can we really manage and conserve without well thought out and
> specifically targeted information sets that only banding can give us?
>
> Allan Richardson
> Morisset NSW
>
> On 24/02/2013, at 2:52 PM, Peter Shute wrote:
>
>> I don't think anyone has ever claimed that banding will itself halt any
>> declines. I was under the impression it was about proving that there is a
>> decline and where the birds routes and feeding grounds are.
>>
>> Could anyone ever claim that a particular wetland deserves protection if
>> they had no idea what effect its availability has on any species? Perhaps
>> things would be far worse than they are without the data we have.
>>
>> Peter Shute
>>
>>
>> --------------------------
>> Sent using BlackBerry
>>
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