Biologists busy banding ducks in New Brunswick’s wetlands

Duck banding program provides useful insight Learn how a small tag can provide big insights into the lives of feathered travellers.

It’s a busy time of year for waterfowl biologist Ted Barney. As fall begins, he and his team at the Canadian Wildlife Service in Sackville, N.B., are tasked with banding more than 3,000 ducks across the Maritimes.

Barney and his team collect many of the ducks at nearby Tantramar Marsh, home to six to eight species of duck. Banding them helps biologists estimate populations, harvest rates and survival. The information will be used to set bag limits for the fall waterfowl hunting season.

The team heads out at dusk in an airboat powered by a corvette motor. After the sun sets, their nets and spotlights come out.

“The airboat allows us to get into multiple wetlands in an evening and be effective,” Barney said.

The airboat allows the team to access a lot of wetland. Barney said it reduces a month’s worth of work to a single night.

“The darkness of the night allows us to use the lights on the airboat to blind the birds,” Barney said. “They can’t see a horizon so they don’t fly and then we can use our dip nets to scoop them up, bring them back to shore and then we band them.”

Once collected Barney and his team assess the sex, age and species of the duck and check it for diseases.

“Highly pathogenic avian influenza has been on the landscape in North America for roughly the last three years,” Barney said. “We have a monitoring program to look at background rates of the virus.”

The technique allows Barney and his team to monitor waterfowl health and put the information into a national database.

After the tests, the ducks are banded and set free in their habitat unharmed. Barney says it’s the way it’s been done for centuries and the animals are handled with care.

“The information coming from this is really critically important to what they do at the Canadian Wildlife Service in terms of managing these populations.”

Barney said the animal care standards for their protocols are assessed by a committee that includes veterinarians.

Barney said anybody can participate in the banding process. He encourages people who find a banded ducks to go online to find out the animal’s details.

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