The Launch of the Banders Without Borders Initiative usgs.gov - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from usgs.gov Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In my research projects in ecology, I’m seeking to understand how interactions between birds and their parasites are affected by environmental degradation linked to human activities such as deforestation, intensive agriculture or climate change. This human impact has caused land cover and climate conditions to change, which has repercussions both on bird populations and on insects (such as mosquitoes) that spread pathogens to birds.
To gather data, I go on field trips with teammates and capture birds and mosquitoes (also known as “vectors”) in habitats with varying degrees of degradation and different environmental characteristics. This allows me to describe the diversity of parasites in natural populations and compare the proportion of infected birds in contrasting habitats.
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 lar
Posted on February 20, 2021 | Views: 580
cwebb2021-02-20T07:45:07-08:00
: A rich archive of data has illuminated the secret lives of birds…
The year was 1902. Paul Bartsch, a mollusk researcher at the Smithsonian Institution, wondered whether the aquatic snails he was studying could be spread from one body of water to another by aquatic birds. To find out, he needed to track the movements of birds. Bartsch hatched a plan. He fastened lightweight aluminum rings inscribed with the year, a serial number and a Smithsonian return address around the legs of 23 nestling black-crowned night herons that he captured along the Anacostia River outside Washington, D.C. And then Bartsch waited for news of the banded birds where they were sighted, what had become of them.