You can experience birds just about anywhere because they are everywhere! Visit Bird Lab’s bird banding project to see them in a different way—up close with a biologist.

Bird banding stations exist all over the world. In the U.S., they are run by master bird banders who receive permits from the Bird Banding Laboratory–an integrated scientific program of the U.S. Geological Survey, to answer scientific questions about birds and their breeding, migration, and wintering habits. Because bird banding involves studying birds in hand and up close, scientists can collect data that would otherwise go missed by simply observing them. 

To capture birds for banding, bird banders string up mist nets, which are fabricated out of thin black thread, giving the illusion of mist. They are nearly imperceptible when properly placed. They are located in various habitat conditions within the study site—like where a forest might meet a meadow or adjacent to a stream. As birds move around their habitat, they may get caught by the net and fall into the pockets that are formed by the net’s construction. Banders go around at frequent intervals to safely extract birds that are in the nets.

To transport them back to the banding table, the birds are placed in soft, breathable bags that keep them calm. Once at the banding table, a bird is taken out of the bag and gently but securely held with special grips that control its movement. The species is identified and matched with a band size that allows the band to freely move along the leg like a bracelet; it does not impede the bird’s movement in any way. Bands come in an array of sizes that reflect the diversity of bird species. Each band has a unique ID number, so if the bird is ever encountered again, it can be identified.

A series of biometric data are then collected. The bird’s age and sex are first determined. The presence of breeding conditions is described, and the amount of fat the bird is carrying is also noted. The bird is measured and weighed and promptly released once everything is collected. When a bird comes out of the bird bag, the whole process of data collection takes under a minute. And off the bird goes!

Protocols are put into place to ensure the bird is safe during the entire process. Bird Lab’s master bander, Nick G. Liadis, holds the permit for banding. He is also certified by the North American Banding Council (NABC) at its highest certification level.

Bird Lab’s novel BRUSH (Banding in Rural-Urban-Suburban Habitats) is designed as a replicable research model that is uniquely positioned to study migrating birds as they traverse landscapes that are increasingly shaped by urbanization.

Despite the prevalence of urbanization throughout eastern North America, relatively few studies have examined migration ecology across the human landscape gradient. Most stopover studies focus on a single unique site or in well-known foraging areas like along a lakeshore, down a peninsula, or in the mountains, limiting understanding of how migrant bird communities and stopover behavior vary in more common landscapes across urban, suburban, and rural environments within the same region. It remains unclear whether habitat patches within developed landscapes support migratory bird communities comparable to those observed in less altered rural habitats.

To address this knowledge gap, Bird Lab established BRUSH, a long-term/constant-effort project designed to investigate migration ecology differently than other researchers. Since 2021, BRUSH has operated standardized migration monitoring stations within urban, suburban, and rural landscapes representative of common habitat conditions throughout the Pittsburgh metropolitan region. This approach provides a novel and replicable framework for examining region-wide migration ecology within an urbanized landscape. 

By examining migration ecology across a human landscape gradient, this program provides insight into the role urban and suburban green spaces play in sustaining migratory bird populations and can inform conservation strategies within increasingly urbanized regions–these conservation plans can be more wide-reaching because they can be designed across large areas since the study sites are representative of these common landscapes within the gradient. The urban-suburban-rural gradient exists in many American cities, so this way of studying birds is explicitly applicable beyond the Pittsburgh region.