When You See This, Act!

With mountain-goat agility (and no height dizziness) some banders in northern Europe catch sea birds of the auk family in mid-air as they whirr along the edge of their breeding cliffs, using an Icelandic fleygustong—a light 15-foot version of the lacrosse stick.

Among the least accessible of birds are the high-flying, high-nesting chimney swifts. Yet more than 560,000 of them have been banded, thanks to the resourcefulness of banders in the southeastern U.S. There, in the fall, migrating swifts pour like black twisters into the tops of chimneys—where there is no fire going. Ben Coffey Jr. of Memphis has been outwitting them since 1932, often helped by senior boy scouts. Weekday evenings, Coffey drives around, spotting the swifts' chosen chimneys. By Friday or Saturday he knows where to get a good haul. For safety of both banders and birds he rules out very high chimneys, limiting himself to those not more than 25 feet high over a flat roof.

When a flock has funneled in for the night (a mass of birds, wing to wing, clutching irregularities in the masonry with their tiny, weak feet and supporting themselves on their spiny tails) Coffey's crew slips a ventilated black tarpaulin over the stack. At dawn, when the birds are ready to leave, the crew returns, removes a flap of the tarp from one corner and sets a trap in its place. The birds fly up to the top of the trap, which is a sheet of cellophane, then flutter down into a funnel which ends in a piece of six-inch stovepipe leading to a gathering cage. In 1940 Coffey hauled 5,600 swifts from one chimney one morning and banded 5,400, while at the same time checking for returns and repeats. Last fall, after working all day on a similar-size flock, he had to let 1,700 go—he had run out of bands. Gordon Hight, a wholesale grocer who puts up scaffolding to tackle tall chimneys in Rome, Georgia has had as many as 9,000 in one flock.

Nearly all trapping techniques have a common defect: they depend on the birds' being concentrated at a feeding, roosting or nesting site. With insect-eating birds, notably warblers and thrushes, and many other species there are no such concentrations, and for almost half a century very few of these (especially treetop dwellers) were banded. Then Dr. Oliver L. Austin Jr., son of the founder of a famous ornithological laboratory and banding station on Cape Cod, returned from Japan with samples of "mist nets." The Japanese use them to obtain birds for food. The finest nets are made of thin black silk or nylon thread, like a huge "invisible" hair net. They average 35 feet long, and range from three to seven feet wide. Set on vertical poles like a badminton net on a natural line of flight for birds, they catch everything. But the nets can be more bane than boon. It is hard to extricate even a moderately entangled bird. The job takes patience, keen eyesight and the delicate fingers of a seamstress (one reason why many women banders do better with nets than men). At worst, it is a hopeless task. Some species, especially chickadees, thrash around so long and violently that they become snarled in a mesh mass like a bait-caster's backlash in the days before spinning reels. Nets are a hazard if left out in high wind or rain—the birds may strangle or die of exposure.

Because of these dangers, and the risk that the nets may fall into the wrong hands, the FWS requires a bander, no matter how experienced with traps, to get a special permit for nets, usually issued only after he has learned the tricks from helping other banders. It puts a sharp limit on the number of nets he may use at one time because a bander might easily get more birds than he could handle.

The best use for nets is in the fall migration, in enterprises like Operation Recovery in which groups of eastern banders work cooperatively. In three weeks last fall at Island Beach, New Jersey, 53 volunteers led by Mrs. Stanley S. Dickerson used their weekends and vacation time to net, band and weigh 5,745 birds of 97 species—about five times the numbers and variety that could have been expected from trapping. The main thing was that there were never too many nets in use at once.

SOME ASTONISHING RECORDS

Volunteer banders have hung up some astonishing records for both themselves and their birds. Beecher S. Bowdish of Demarest, New Jersey holds the longevity title, having banded from 1913 through 1958 (almost 50,000 birds of 130 species). He quit at 87 because he was afraid he was getting old. Bennett K. Matlack, 74, a retired educator of Bridgeton, New Jersey banded 11,013 birds, of 97 species, in 1958.

Some of the birds are equally energetic and almost as long-lived. A Caspian tern, banded as a nestling on Little Hat Island near St. James, Michigan on July 19, 1925, was shot (legally, for a scientific collection) in Ottawa County, Ohio on Aug. 19, 1951, after a full life of 26 years. It misses, by a whisker, the world record for band-proved longevity: an arctic tern ringed as a chick on the Elbe River, Germany in 1920 was killed by a cat when it was nesting on a nearby island in 1947. An American arctic tern holds the distance record: banded on July 23, 1928 on an island in Turnavik Bay, Labrador, it was found dead four months later at Port Shepstone, Natal—8,000 miles by great circle and at least 2,000 miles farther by the route this bird travels. A Manx shearwater holds the homing distance record: taken from its nesting burrow on Skokholm, an islet off the coast of Wales, flown to Boston and released, it made the 3,200 statute miles back home to its mate in 12� days.

Despite the arctic tern's renown for regular transatlantic crossings, most people still think of migration as essentially a north-south movement. Ornithologists have long known that it is not so simple. Now banding is filling gaps in their knowledge but also raising new questions. A relatively nonmigratory species may wander far afield. A mockingbird banded by Matlack at Bridgeton in June of 1958 was found dead two months later at Sidney, Ohio—500 miles west. Some birds are downright vagrants. A common redpoll (one of the smallest of American finches) banded at Ridgewood, New Jersey in 1956 was found dead at Edmonton, Alberta, two years later and 2,100 miles away. Several recoveries from Operation Recovery have been startling: birds supposedly southbound for the winter had inexplicably wandered (in some cases, hundreds of miles) to the northeast or northwest.