Duck Banding
Jamestown area volunteers banding ducks
to provide survival data to help officials
Article taken from The Jamestown Sun, September 7, 1996
by
Scott Kraus, Sun Staff Writer
Duck hunters will find bag limits and season lengths more precisely fitted to duck populations in a few years partly because of work by a group of Jamestown area volunteers.
About 20 people from the Northern Prairie Science Center near Jamestown and the National Audubon Society are spending evenings this fall banding area ducks, said local coordinator Bob Cox, an ecologist at the science center.
Wildlife personnel will use data from bands that hunters return for the Central Flyway's new Adaptive Harvest Management system, which will provide more uniform population information to set yearly bag limits and season lengths.
Hunters can now call in the new duck band information to 1-800-327-2263.
"For this whole system to work you need feedback," Cox said. "You need to know what happened last year."
Getting good long-term survival information will take at least four years, Cox said. So the project, which is in its first year this fall, will continue for six more years.
"You don't want to over harvest birds," he said. "Ideally you want to harvest the surplus."
Three other paid groups — one each for North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana — are also banding ducks.
Cox said personnel here chose to form a volunteer banding group because the prairie pothole region of the state is vital to overall duck production. So it's important to get good information here.
"What happens in the prairies matters a tremendous amount to fall flight," he said. "Variations in the mid-continent region explains a lot of variation in overall numbers."
And they're also helping out because it's fun.
"We got into biology because we enjoy handling birds, and we like going out in the field and seeing what's going on," Cox said.
Volunteer Terry Shaffer from the center said he doesn't mind the evening work.
"It's a personal interest of mine and I just wanted to do what I could to help out in some small way," Shaffer said. "Plus it's enjoyable."
Different volunteers spend up to four hours each evening of the week on the project, which started in mid-August and will run to mid-September, according to Cox.
With landowners' permission, they're using five circular traps set on private lands around Jamestown or on the National Audubon Society's Alkali Lake Sanctuary. Ducks swim into the traps to eat the barley inside.
Seven nights a week some of the volunteers go out to remove the ducks, band them and release them.
