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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