Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Sunday afternoon find

On Sunday, I met a group of parents with their young children for a walk at East Beach on St. Simons Island. It was a beautiful afternoon. The children were having a blast. We discovered a few cannonball jellyfish
but the fascinating find was a small pair of wings with orange stubby legs and feet attached. There was aluminum band on one of the legs. I took the band and told them I would let them know about the bird. Not too many years back, I would have written a letter with the banded number then mailed it to the bird banding lab and waited .
Here we are talking about the find on the beach.
We now live in the 21st century and it is so easy to find out about the bird from the band.
Just go to the bird banding website. Click on Report a bird band and follow the directions. In less than fifteen minutes I knew that the bird was a Forester’s Tern. It was banded in Wisconsin on June 19, 2006. I sent the information on to a couple of the families. One family got out the map and found Wisconsin. They got to see how far this one bird had traveled. Wow! How cool is that!

2 comments:

  1. Very cool this internet world....I will save that banding link.
    What do you think happened to the tern...did it make a wrong turn..into a hawks talon?

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  2. Great to hear that the link can help. It was fun to get the information on the tern. I am not sure what happened to the tern. That is a really busy beach but hawk is one good explaination.

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