If You Love Birds, This Could Be Your Dream Job

Breaking into the field of bird banding involves a lot of training and on-the-job experience. Whether you’re looking for a paid position or volunteer work, you’ll need to undergo extensive training before you are legally allowed to capture and handle wild birds.

If you love birds and you’d like an activity that gets you out in nature while helping wildlife conservation, bird banding might be the perfect fit for you. However, becoming a bird bander could be a little more complicated than you may think. Read on to find out more about this fascinating job.

What is Bird Banding?

Bird banding is when scientists catch a wild bird and put aluminum or brightly colored bands on the bird’s legs. Each captured bird gets a band with a unique set of numbers. Recapturing a previously banded bird can help researchers understand important information about bird conservation. Tracking the movement of birds can also provide useful information such as life cycle, migratory patterns, and what resources they need.

By studying the data, scientists gain information on bird behavior. They also learn valuable information on where to focus conservation efforts.

Who Bands Birds?

Bird banders may be universities, non-profit environmental groups like the National Audubon Society, federal and state agencies, and private individuals. Not just anyone can be a bird bander, though, because it involves handling wild birds. Banding birds is controlled under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Banders need to obtain a banding permit from the Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL).

How Can I Get a Banding Permit?

The BBL does not provide training for obtaining a permit but recommends that people gain experience by learning through various methods including an apprenticeship, in-the-field training with an active bander or banding group, or taking classes.

How to Get Started With Bird Banding

You can check with universities in your area to see if they have any volunteer opportunities where you could gain experience with wild birds. When universities study birds, typically a professor will take graduate or undergraduate students out into the field to learn bird banding. However, there may be volunteer opportunities through universities to gain some experience.

Another option is to look into courses that teach handling and banding birds. For example, The Institute for Bird Populations is a nonprofit organization that offers bird bander training.

You can check into environmental nonprofits or state wildlife agencies in your area to see if they are accepting volunteers or internships as well.

So You Have the Experience. How Do You Get a Job Bird Banding?

Like any job, becoming a bird bander requires getting your foot in the door first and gaining valuable experience in the field. Once you have the experience, there are opportunities out there. However, they may be seasonal, and because they are limited, they may be fairly competitive to obtain.  

You can check out the job boards at nonprofits and wildlife agencies such as the Institute for Bird Populations or the Audubon.

Sometimes bird banding is included in field technician jobs for conservation organizations or other wildlife agencies. Field technicians often have other duties in addition to netting birds for banding and should have experience in handling birds.