About Bird Banding 
at the 
Powdermill Avian Research Center

Powdermill Nature Reserve is the field biological station of Carnegie Museum of Natural History, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.  The station was established in 1956 through the vision and leadership of then Director of CMNH, Dr. M. Graham Netting.  The Reserve itself now comprises nearly 2,200 acres and is dominated by mature second growth forest with some early and late successional old fields, numerous streams, and a few small constructed ponds and wetlands.  The Reserve is located in the Laurel Highlands region of southwestern Pennsylvania.
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One of the first permanent research projects begun at Powdermill was a landbird banding program initiated in the summer of 1961 by Robert C. Leberman, who semi-retired in 2004, after 43 years as the program's Senior Bird Bander.  Bob Mulvihill joined the program in 1978 as a volunteer college student and was hired full-time in 1983.   He currently serves as Field Ornithology Projects Coordinator for the Powdermill Avian Research Center.  Adrienne Leppold similarly began as a volunteer college student in 2000 and took over as Bander-in-Charge in 2004, a position that was made full-time in 2006.  Powdermill's program may well be the longest running, year round professional banding operation in the country.
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The banding station is situated in a 10-hectare area of old fields, hedgerows, marshy ponds, and alder- and willow-lined streams, bounded by extensive intact mixed deciduous forest along Laurel Ridge to the east and low intensity agricultural areas in the Ligonier Valley to the west.  The program utilizes up to 70 12-meter long mist nets placed singly or in series of up to eight connected nets in hedgerow gaps and along habitat edges, mostly where the adjacent vegetation is not much higher than the nets themselves.  When fully opened, the nets are about 2.5 meters high.  The locations for most of the mists nets used in the Powdermill banding program have changed little over the course of 45 years.  To maintain the efficiency of the net locations for catching birds, habitat management is done, as needed, to remove tall woody vegetation from the vicinity of some net lanes.  Recently, active habitat management has also been done to clear overgrown brush away from the pond banks and stream edges to open up the wetland areas for more aerial foraging songbirds and to attract more wading birds.
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From April through November, mist nets are opened before dawn each banding day (during the winter months banding operations are scaled back and, on most days, plastic coated wire Potter traps baited with seed are used).


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Captured birds are carefully removed from the nets every 30-40 minutes (depending upon conditions), placed in paper bags, and returned back to the banding lab for processing.
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Once in the lab, birds are identified to species, banded (or reprocessed if they had been banded previously), and information about their age, sex, wing length, fat deposits, and body mass is recorded.  The whole process of collecting data for each captured bird takes less than a minute, after which the bird is promptly released through a small sliding door in the window next to the banding desk.
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Additional information often is collected at Powdermill as part of other ongoing research projects, including bioacoustical studies and a photographic guide book project.  Studies of molt in birds is of particular interest at Powdermill, so detailed notes regarding the pattern, timing, and sequence of molt is also often recorded.

The Powdermill Banding Station Protocol can be referenced for more detail regarding banding procedures and operations.

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Since it began full-time operation in 1962, the program has generated banding records at a rate of nearly 13,000 birds per year, with recaptures, on average, making up 20 percent of the annual total number of birds caught.  As of the end of the year 2005, the program's database included records from just under 460,000 original bandings and over 110,000 recaptures, all of which represent 190 species.  Our records are submitted regularly to the Bird Banding Laboratory, which maintains the bird-banding database for all of North America.
 
 

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