To educate and contribute to global bird databases, the Arkansas State University Bird Observatory is holding bird banding sessions Sundays and Wednesdays starting at seven a.m.

Than Boves, Ph.D., professor of ecology, founder and director of the bird observatory, said banding is a method of studying birds that involves putting a numbered band around a bird’s leg to make them identifiable. From banding, researchers and conservationists can gather where a bird is from, its age, where it was captured and its weight when captured.

Todd Green, Ph.D., assistant professor at New York Institute of Technology, said banding is essential for understanding the movement path of birds as they migrate and a lot of banding is focused on large-scale migration, but is also important for studying birds that live locally. 

Most of the people banding are students of Boves’, but it is open to A-State students, faculty and members of the community.

Nora Hines, an environmental science doctoral student from Pine Bush, New York, is in Boves’ advanced avian ecology class. She primarily studies cardinals and is taking part in banding to gain experience handling, banding and extracting. 

Hines said the banding sessions would be fun for students who like the idea of holding a bird. 

“It kind of makes you realize what they actually are rather than just seeing them and noticing that there’s a bird there. So it’s cool it connects you to them a bit,” Hines said.

Boves said this is an opportunity for students to learn not only about the diversity of birds they share the campus with but also to get an intimate interaction with them by seeing them up close, holding them and learning how they collect data about them. 

The birds banded get entered into the United States Geological Survey’s Bird Banding Lab Database. That data is then available for anyone to access for information about bird migration, conservation and physiology.

Boves said he implemented the banding station in 2015 with some of his graduate students and at first they were banding at the St. Francis Sunken Lands before getting access to the property on Red Wolf Trail off Marion Berry Parkway. 

“It was opened up to get people experience handling birds, so they could then take that knowledge and those skills and start a research project, put it on the resume to go get a job, or just learn about how to do that and maybe in the future they could use that in some way,” Boves said.

Boves said the bird observatory has changed a lot since it was founded and the bird community has changed with its habitat. Oct. 27, the week after banding is done, they have plans to remove some invasive species that are growing on the property.

“We’re going to kind of push back what’s called ecological succession back to where it was ten years ago. We’ll see if that then causes the bird community to shift back to those that like lower stuff more than a higher canopy species,” Boves said. 

Green said he studies large flightless birds, working mostly with cassowaries, and it’s a nice change of pace to be able to work with small birds at the bird observatory. 

“To switch from something that is over 100 pounds to something that weighs, you know, one of the birds today, it was like 12 ounces or something like that. It’s pretty incredible,” Green said. “I really enjoy that I’ve been able to kind of help out, and they’ve taught me a lot too.”

Green said people often don’t think about themselves as part of the natural world and experiences like this can be life-changing. 

Boves said the spectacle of migration is a phenomenal experience as billions of birds are moving from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere and back. He said with banding you get to be in the heart of it. 

“We’re catching it in a snapshot, but we’re getting to kind of go through that process with them, and so I think most students would probably at least find it interesting. I’m not expecting them to be like, ‘That’s it. I’m gonna study birds.’ But knowing what they’re sharing the earth with and the campus with will probably make them walk outside and think a little differently about stuff around them,” Boves said. 

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