A Brief History of Banding
Eastern Phoebes don’t stand out. Their plumage is more for camouflage than show. They fade into the background. Their biggest claim to fame might be a brief appearance in a Robert Frost poem.
But they’re also at the centre of a scientific revolution. Better yet, they’re part of an unsolved mystery that could upend a key moment in ornithology.
For context on that mystery, we’ll just need to scoot back in time and briefly cover 2100 years of history. And that starts with visiting a beleaguered Roman garrison in the 3rd century BCE. I swear this is relevant.
It’s the middle of the second Punic War, and things do not look great for Rome in general. After Hannibal’s legendary crossing of the alps, his Carthaginians have dealt a series of decisive military blows to the Roman Empire. They’re quickly losing Northern Italy to the invaders.
Rome is actually going to come out on top after a miraculous turnaround in Africa. But that’s years down the road. For now: our Roman garrison has been weathering a devastating siege by Ligurian forces. They can’t take much more. They’re exhausted, demoralized, and dying. Forget the war, all that matters to them is whether help will come in time. They have no contact with the outside world. They have no idea if anyone is out there.
As it turns out, someone is: Roman officer Quintus Fabius Pictor. He’s organizing a rescue. But for it to succeed, he needs the coordination of those inside the siege to turn their strike into a pincer movement. And he needs to assure them help is coming.
It would be almost impossible to get anything out of the siege, much less get it back in again. But they manage to squeeze through one soldier with some very precious cargo.
That soldier makes it to Quintus and hands over their saviour: a swallow. The Romans are aware of the birds’ ability to b-line back to their nests from wherever they’re released.
Quintus ties a thread to the bird’s leg, with knots indicating how many days until they will be able to attack the Ligurians - and when those inside should stage their coordinated uprising. They release the swallow who dutifully returns, carrying the invaluable message with it.
Quintus’ story of the besieged garrison is the first documented instance we have of a bird being banded to convey information. For the next 2000 years, birds will be our messengers and carry bands of ownership before, at long last, someone considers that maybe we could use this sort of identification to learn about them instead.
In the interim, Pliny the Elder writes about pigeons being used routinely to get messages in and out of sieges around 44BCE. Caecina, a chariot-racing knight of Volterra, catches local swallows and brings them with him when he has a race in Rome, 217 km away. He then paints them with the winning colours of the race and releases them, knowing they’ll find their way home and bring the news with them.
It’s kind of amazing to think about how much critical information has been carried by birds throughout human history. Once we figured out we could reliably use them to send and receive messages, they became the fastest way to relay information with minimal infrastructure. Tied to pigeons’ feet was essential intel which could change history. Imagine the difference it could have made if one of those birds had been nabbed by a predator or failed to make it back for any number of reasons. All the way up until World War 2, Homing Pigeons are still an essential part of war efforts.
For a very long time, scientific inquiry is an accidental byproduct of bird ownership and message relay. We might note when and where captured birds were found and the details of the bands on their legs, extrapolating some information from them:
Sometime around 1600AD, a banded Canary Falcon makes a 16-hour round trip from Andalusia to the island of Tenerife - having flown 1200 km…
In 1708, hunters in Sussex County find a silver collar on a duck indicating it belonged to the King of Denmark…
In 1728, a grey heron is recovered that bears a band of Duke Ferdinand, meaning it had been banded at least 60 years earlier…
But these piecemeal data are more points of interest than anything scientifically rigorous. The aims are always selfish - getting our messages across or declaring ownership over the bird. It takes until the 1800s for anyone to connect the dots and realize this could be used to teach us something more about the birds themselves. And in North America, the naturalist John James Audubon has a problem, a solution, and a way to change bird research forever.
It’s 1804. Audubon’s father has sent him across the Atlantic to avoid being conscripted in Napoleon’s army. He’s living on a plantation in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. He’s just shy of his 19th birthday but already spending his leisure time exploring and sketching, laying the foundation of extraordinary ornithological work and timeless illustrations and etchings to come.
On his explorations around the plantation he comes upon a cave, and inside - a nest of Eastern Phoebes! Our heroes finally arrive on the scene. Audubon has a theory about them. He believes they exhibit natal philopatry - a tendency for young to return to the place they were born. But how to test it when, even more than most birds, Phoebes aren’t exactly easy to tell apart?
Audubon’s idea, described as a ‘legend in the annals of ornithology’, is to tie silver thread around the legs of 5 nestlings and acclimate them before they leave the nest. Then, when they fly off into the wide world, he just has to wait and check any Phoebes that return, to see if they have a band. Lo and behold, the next year he finds two adult Phoebes with bands have returned to the area, confirming his theory.
This might seem simple (and maybe obvious, given the ubiquity of bird banding today) but at the time it’s a whole new approach to ornithological study. It takes bird banding from an incidental byproduct to something that can be codified and expanded with experimental rigour. Audubon becomes the father of bird banding in North America. The world of ornithology gets much bigger thanks to him, a cave, and 5 Phoebes.
…And it might have all been a lie.
Audubon is known as a guy who will stretch the truth. Throughout his life, he’s desperate to lock down his reputation as a world-class ornithologist. And as he starts to publish his now iconic books of bird etchings and illustrations, The Birds of America, in 1827, that reputation becomes even more important - after all, it could seriously drive up sales.
He’s been accused of plagiarizing other prominent ornithologists of the day, or full-on making up evidence so he can claim first sighting of an interesting species or behaviour. So: were there really any Phoebes? It took until 2018, as far as I can tell, for anyone to critically examine this legendary experiment and try to come up with an answer.
There’s two things working against Audubon here:
One, the timeline doesn’t exactly match the facts of his life. Audubon himself says that he banded the birds in the 1804 breeding season. But in the 1805 breeding season, when he supposedly found 2 returning birds… he was back in France (from March 12, 1805 to June 4, 1806). Suspicious. But maybe not damning. He could have mixed up the dates, or the year, or found the returning Phoebes in 1806 and fudged the year for simplicity. Bad scientific rigour, not a smoking gun. For that you have to go to some statistics:
The idea that two of the five birds would have returned the next year is… kind of crazy. His Phoebe study has been replicated large-scale - once with 217 nestling Phoebes, and then with 11,847. Those studies found that 1.3%, and 1.8%, respectively, of the Phoebes returned to their nesting area. And we’re talking about a 250-kilometer-squared area. So the idea that Audubon found a full 20% of his birds in the immediate area of the nest is… questionable at best.
No one knows for sure, or will ever know, at this point. One of the fundamental pillars of modern ornithology may have been built on a lie to further John James Audubon’s reputation.
But whether or not he actually did the Phoebe experiment as recorded, it was certainly a very good idea. We know that because, real or fake, it has been expanded into a massive field of research that still brings in essential data to this day. It would take a century of codifying and expansion before broad-scale, numbered-band studies would emerge. ‘Systematic’ bird banding started in Europe in 1899 and was introduced in North America in 1901, borrowing techniques from the United States Fish Commission.
And how about Audubon? Did his reputation gamble pay off? Well, he’s been canonized in the pantheon of naturalists. More than 150 years after his death, his name is still everywhere - in towns, neighbourhoods and streets. He identified 25 new species. Dozens of scientific names first published by him are still in use. And of course his magnum opus, The Birds of America, a colour-plate book of 435 prints, is still considered one of the finest works of ornithology ever produced.
And what about the book? Did his reputation-chasing drive up its value? OK, I’m reaching, it’d be a landmark achievement regardless of how much he artificially puffed himself up. But it must be said: today, there are only 120 known copies of the book left in the world. Most of them are rightfully in the hands of institutions which means if you want your own personal copy to dog-ear, you need to get your hands on one of about a dozen in circulation.
Adjusted for inflation, 5 of the 10 most expensive books ever sold at auction were all copies of The Birds of America. Of those, the most expensive was one bought in 2013 for $11.5 million.
I just hope Audubon thanked those Eastern Phoebes.
Much appreciation to Bob Montgomerie writing for the American Ornithological Society. He did an article based on Matthew Halley’s 2018 paper which I cribbed a lot of Audubon info from. I was truly just going to land on ‘Audubon introduced bird banding to North America the end!’ until I read about the controversy thanks to him. Also, Halley’s paper was behind a paywall so I could only read the abstract.
Also much thanks to the University of New Mexico’s Searchable Ornithological Research Archive, through which I accessed Harold Wood’s all-gas-no-brakes History of Bird Banding (pages 256-265). If you’d like a slightly expanded greatest hits from Quintus to today, check that out in handy PDF form.
If you want to soak in Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’ without spending $11.5 million, The University of Pittsburgh has you covered.
https://americanornithology.org/audubons-legendary-experiments/
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/anh.2018.0487
https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/auk/v062n02/p0256-p0265.pdf