In honor of World Migratory Bird Day, yesterday I visited the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. The Center is located in Manomet, a seaside village of Plymouth. Special free programming included a presentation by the Center’s bird banding experts, children’s activities, and a bird-a-thon. I was especially interested in learning how the Center bands songbirds. Banding takes place annually from April through November. Some days the Center bands as few as 10, on other days, upwards of 200. Manomet has records on migrating and resident birds dating back over 50 years and it was fascinating to learn about their banding protocols and population trends.

Juvenile Carolina Wren – The Carolina Wren population is growing in Massachusetts

while the Blue Jay population is in steep decline.

The theme of Wold Migratory Bird Days 2024 is insects and the importance of insects as a critical source of protein for migrating birds.

Insects sightings at Manomet on included Autumn Meadowhawk damselflies, American Lady Butterfly, skipper of unknown species, a variety of bees, and several Monarchs. Unlike Cape Ann, the Seaside Goldenrod is still blooming on Cape Cod.

Monarch Butterfly and Seaside Goldenrod

The public is welcome from dawn to dusk to walk the trails, enjoy the view from the bluff and bird watch.

Address:
125 Manomet Point Road
Plymouth, MA 02360
(508) 224-6521

From the Center’s Website:

Overview of the Bird Banding Lab

For more than 50 years, Manomet has maintained a spring and fall migration bird banding program. Bird banding is an effective method of research that helps answer important questions on issues from conservation to climate change. Manomet’s banding lab, one of the first bird observatories established in North America, focuses on areas including:

• Migration: When and where birds arrive can tell us about habitat and food availability. This information can be used to inform habitat management and land use strategies.
• Population: With the data we collect in the lab, we can produce estimates on changes in population and notate trends over time.
• Life history: Banding contributes valuable information on longevity, habitat, diet, and other physiological trends across species.
• Productivity: Banding helps us detect shifts in age or sex ratios that would otherwise go undetected.

Manomet staff has recorded over 1,000 plant, animal, and fungus species on site, showing the value of our coastal forest and shoreline as a rich laboratory for research.

Why band birds?

Migratory bird banding operations represent an underutilized source of data about bird migration. Long-term data sets in ecology, like ours, may lead to discoveries often missed in shorter-term studies, and are critical for establishing baselines and tracking changes in the natural world. Because birds are widely surveyed by professional and amateur observers alike, and their natural histories are often well-understood, wild bird populations can be useful sentinels of environmental change and ecosystem condition.

Check here for weekly summaries of current and past banding seasons.

The banding team operates 50 mist nets on the property surrounding Manomet headquarters in southeastern Massachusetts along Cape Cod Bay. Nets are kept open during daylight hours, Monday through Friday, in the spring and fall. Banders walk the net lanes, safely removing trapped birds and returning them to the lab where their species, age, sex, weight, and fat content are measured and recorded. We have banded over 250,000 birds and handled over 400,000 since banding began on the property in 1966. We band around 2,500 new birds each year.

As Manomet’s longest-standing program, the banding lab has helped train hundreds of prospective researchers, educators, and conservation advocates since its inception. We educate about 1,000 visiting school children, volunteers, and college students every year. We strive to engage people of all ages with nature and to measurably increase people’s understanding of environmental change.

 

What is World Migratory Bird Day?

In 1993, the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center created International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD). This educational campaign focused on the Western Hemisphere celebrated its 25th year in 2018. Since 2007, IMBD has been coordinated by Environment for the Americas (EFTA), a non-profit organization that strives to connect people to bird conservation.

In 2018, EFTA joined the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) and the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA) to create a single, global bird conservation education campaign, World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD). Continuing our tradition with IMBD, WMBD celebrates and brings attention to one of the most important and spectacular events in the Americas – bird migration.

This new alliance furthers migratory bird conservation around the globe by creating a worldwide campaign organized around the planet’s major migratory bird corridors, the African-Eurasian flyway, the East Asian-Australasian flyway, and the Americas flyway. By promoting the same event name, annual conservation theme, and messaging, we combine our voices into a global chorus to boost the urgent need for migratory bird conservation.

EFTA will continue to focus its efforts on the flyways in the Americas to highlight the need to conserve migratory birds and protect their habitats, and will continue to coordinate events, programs, and activities in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean at protected areas, refuges, parks, museums, schools, zoos, and more. As many as 700 events and programs are hosted annually to introduce the public to migratory birds and ways to conserve them.