This Lincoln sparrow was caught during the 2021 bird banding at Ridgway State Park. The Lincoln sparrow was named by Audubon in 1833, on his expedition to the coast of Labrador while working on a huge project painting âBirds of America." Photo courtesy Sue Hirshman
Bird banding remains an important activity
Bird banding has long been an important technique for identifying individual birds, to keep track of them and learn how birds travel and live.
The technique dates back to the early 1800s, when John James Audubon himself tied threads to birds’ legs, and used those threads to identify individual birds visiting his farm in Pennsylvania. These experiments helped him prove that a bird called the Eastern Phoebe returned to the same nesting sites each year.
We have our own bird banding here in Oura...
