“If we lose banding data, we would lose important information about harvest rates of individual duck species,” said Dave Rave of Bemidji, a retired DNR research biologist and wildlife manager. “We also would lose information about what ducks are being shot, whether adult or juvenile, male or female. We’d have to guess at harvest rates of adult female ducks, which is important to know because we have to protect females for breeding.”
To maintain the program’s statistical validity, a sample of ducks must be banded each year, Rave said.
The possible closing of the banding program frustrates waterfowlers and birders, as well as researchers and managers. But the Bird Banding Lab isn’t the primary object of the proposed cutbacks.
Instead, the Ecosystems Mission Area, which houses the banding lab, is being targeted in part because it sometimes conducts global warming research, which critics say can impede economic growth, particularly in the western U.S.
More accurately, most of the research benefits land, water, wildlife — and people.
One study, for example, posted recently on the Ecosystems Mission Area website is titled “Unintended indirect effects limit elk productivity from supplemental feeding in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.”