Posted: April 20, 2014 - 12:16am
By Mary Landers
912-652-0337 mary.landers@savannahnow.com
Peter Range banded his first bird, an evening grosbeak, when he was just a kid in eastern Tennessee. The feisty finch put its mark on him, too.
“Some birds peck,” he said. “An evening grosbeak grabs the skin and takes a divot out of it.”
Still, Range was hooked on banding when he discovered one of the grosbeaks he recaptured in 1968 had been banded six years before in Lincoln, Maine.
On Tuesday morning, more than 45,000 banded birds later, Range demonstrated his technique to interested birders at the Visitors’ Center of the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge.
Just prior to the demo, Range and several volunteers caught a half dozen birds in mist nets in the nearby woods and held them in mesh produce bags to await their tags.
First up was a hooded warbler, a local nester that comes back to the area in the spring. This one was a female, in its second year and on the skinny side, Range said, holding it gently but firmly in his right fist. With pliers and a practiced touch, Range fitted onto the bird’s leg a metal band stamped with a unique identifying number.
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