Release Date:
February 24, 2021
An overview of the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory’s successes in collection and curation of bird banding data in the last year, featuring some of the remarkable bird bandings, recaptures, and encounters from 2020.
In 2020, the Bird Banding Laboratory reached an impressive milestone celebrating its 100-year anniversary. For a century, the BBL in collaboration with the Bird Banding Office of the Environment and Climate Change Canada, has administered the North American Bird Banding Program and maintained a database of over 77 million records of banded birds and 5 million encounters of those banded birds. In 2020 alone, the NABBP received over a half a million banding records and almost 80,000 encounters of previously banded birds (see Figure 1 and 2). In comparison, in 2019 over 900,000 birds were banded. This reduction in banding data received at the lab is a consequence of reduced efforts likely due to COVID-19 restrictions that limited large gatherings of people throughout the year. Regardless of these limitations, average of band encounter reports were similar between 2019 (90,000) and 2020 (87,000) (see Figure 2). Luckily, outdoor and birdwatching activities in 2020 still continued despite COVD restrictions, allowing people to search for, find, and report banded birds.