(Listen to the radio version here.)
Ever since a female Pileated Woodpecker wearing a leg band appeared in my yard on September 14, I’ve been taking photo after photo of her, trying to tease out the band number. I’ve been calling her BG for “Banded Girl,” and she’s been exceptionally cooperative, so I wonder if she might be the female who hatched this year who came several times with an unbanded adult male who nested somewhere in the neighborhood. That young female let me take lots of photos and, because her father wasn’t very concerned about my presence, she learned to be tolerant of me, too.
Sometimes we think we can recognize individual birds because of plumage anomalies or behavioral quirks (like unusual tameness), but the only way we can be certain about an individual is if it is banded, and if we are, each time, looking at the ONLY such banded individual in the area or can confirm the number each time. Even if I were to learn for certain that BG was banded as a young bird this season in my neighborhood, I still couldn’t be 100 percent certain that she was the same bird I’d seen seeing earlier. Even when they’re not trying to be coy, birds do keep their secrets.
Every USGS bird band has a seam where the bander crimped it closed, making it easy to verify the first and last digits. I’m certain that the band number has the consecutive digit string 844-65412, and my photos suggest that the 844 is the entire string before the hyphen, but that’s only 8 digits when bands for a long time have had 9 digits.
But I was so focused on the band number that I didn’t notice something extraordinary about BG’s band until this morning. It has the inscription CALL 1-800-327-BAND above the number, and LAUREL MD 20708 below. Bands like this were issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Bird Banding Lab starting in 1995, but sometime after 2000 or 2010 (I can’t get clear information when), bands started including the inscription WWW.REPORTBAND.GOV. The banded male Pileated Woodpecker who visited me for over 4 years, BB, wore a band with this newer inscription both above and below the number.
The band on the female who showed up briefly last winter definitely had the website inscribed below the number, but I didn’t see the band well enough to confirm anything about the inscription above the number.
BG is definitely wearing an older band. But even when the Bird Banding Lab issues new bands, banders use up their old supply before ordering new ones. So I have no way of knowing whether she was banded fairly recently by someone who still had some older bands or, much less likely, whether she was banded more than a decade ago.
I sent the Bird Banding Lab the number I worked out though it has just 8 digits—their website automatically added a zero at the start of the number, making it 0844-65412. And when I pressed “Submit,” I got an immediate response that no bander has sent in data about this number yet; they did not say that the number was non-existent. So I’m hopeful that BG was banded this season with an old band, and as happens at many banding stations during heavy migration periods, the data will be sent to the Bird Banding Lab when there’s a lull in banding work.
BG showed up two or three times on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and stayed wonderfully calm about my photographing her at close range. Unfortunately, she hasn’t appeared yet today. I’m trying to amass more photos of the band, but this takes persistence, patience, and a lot of luck.
In the coming days, if her path doesn’t intersect with any of the many raptors coursing through my neighborhood right now, and if she sticks around, I’ll take more photos and eagerly await news from the Bird Banding Lab if indeed I got the number correct and the bander reports banding her.
Anything issued as recently as 1995 is hardly an antique, but spotting a band that could be more than three decades old is still exciting. Whatever BG’s story is must be fascinating! I hope I can get the information to find out what it is.
This is very cool! Hope you get confirmation at some point
Did you try entering it as 0844-65412?