Measuring Success: PWC Receives A One-Of-A-Kind Banding Permit

By Claudia Duckworth

As someone who has rehabilitated wildlife for 20 years, I am often asked "How do you know if what you do is successful? Do the animals that you release survive?"

The honest answer is always, "We don’t know."

PWC rehabilitators work hard to care for injured animals. We try to ensure that they will have every chance of surviving in the natural world. But there is no way of knowing what happens after release. The National Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL) (Department of the Interior) strictly regulates tagging or marking wild birds. Obtaining a permit requires an approved application and time served as an apprentice to a master bander. Most permits are for gathering data about breeding habits, migration, dispersal, social structure, life-span, survival rates and population growth.

Rehabbed birds skew the statistics that banders compile. They do not want data on birds that have been sick, injured or orphaned and kept in captivity for a period of time – birds that would not have survived without human intervention. This policy has prevented rehabilitation centers like PWC from obtaining banding permits. Their reasons are legitimate and I respect them.

We have been thinking for some time of a way that PWC could track our releases and hence learn what is working and what is not. PWC made a proposal to the National Bird Banding Laboratory back in February 2010 and were notified in the fall of 2010 that they agreed to give us this one-of-a-kind banding permit.

This permit allows us to place temporary bands made of a material that will disintegrate over time on the birds that we release. We can band any species as long as we band without harm or danger to the bird. Our bird information will not go into the national database used by all other federal banders, but is used for our purposes only.

Photo by Jeanette Stone: Turkey Vulture wearing the first PWC release band #00001

This permit is a first for BBL and PWC is appreciative. Our first bird to release with a PWC band was a Turkey Vulture in 2010. Since then, hundreds of birds have been banded and PWC has received calls about sightings.

If you see a banded bird, please call and let us know the species and location. The ability to track our releases is a significant and exciting step forward in our efforts to rehabilitate and release animals that will survive in the wild – and to learn how successful our rehab efforts have been!