Arkansas Game and Fish Commission

Bands Are Much More Than “Bling” For the Duck Hunter

LITTLE ROCK - It’s known as “bling” jewelry for the duck hunter and they’re nearly as popular as camo clothing among Arkansas waterfowl hunters. Bird bands are worn proudly on lanyards across Arkansas’s sloughs and flooded timber.

The bands are bird bands, ducks in particular. A necklace of them is a symbol of a devout and successful hunter.

They have another purpose, and that’s the original one – for research purposes.

Birds of all sorts can carry a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service band. If reported to the Service, these bands can provide essential and interesting information on the origins of the bird.

But they must be reported to be useful. Unfortunately in the past, they were often nothing more than decoration for duck call lanyards because hunters failed to report the band.

It just takes a simple and free phone call. Past reporting procedures required writing in with the information. But all through the years, hunters have always been able to keep the bands

The procedure for reporting bands got much easier 10 years ago with the establishment of band recovery toll-free hotline - 1-800-327-BAND. With this change, the Fish and Wildlife Service staff believes reporting rates have improved dramatically over the estimated 33 percent report rate before the number. Last year in Arkansas, more than half of all reports were made using the toll-free number, one of the highest use rates in the Mississippi Flyway. This year a new website – reportband.gov – was established to provide another easy method for reporting bands.

"Banding is one of the oldest and most important migratory bird monitoring programs in North America," said B.H. Powell of the U.S. Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL) in Laurel, Md. "In order to effectively analyze banding and recovery data, it is necessary to know the rate that encountered bands are reported to the BBL. Low reporting rates increase the cost to state agencies by increasing the sample size needed for meaningful data analysis. But our toll-free number has been an extremely effective method that allows hunters and other persons encountering banded birds to report the bands."

This season, if you who experience the excitement of harvesting a banded bird, you can find out quickly and easily where the bird came from, how old it is, and other information on the bird.

It's free, and it's as simple as phoning 1-800-327-BAND or logging on to reportband.gov. By reporting the recovered banded bird, you will not only assist the Fish and Wildlife Service in collecting important data that helps the natural resource you love, you get to learn some interesting facts, too.

And, yes, you get to keep the band.