29 May 2025

Here are some answers to your recent questions about the Pitt peregrines’ bands.

The Blue Band: This week a blue band showed up on the nestbox gravel and several of you asked if it had come from one of the peregrines. No, the blue tape is still on the female chick.

In fact it’s not a peregrine band. Ted Nichols saw it come in on the leg of a prey item the chicks ate earlier this week. It may have been on a northern flicker.

Band reports: Will we hear where these banded chicks go later in life?

The USGS Bird Banding Lab (BBL) is the repository for all bird band data. When birds are banded the bander sends the numbers to BBL. When a band sighting is reported to BBL, they report the sighting to the bander, in this case the PA Game Commission. Eventually I hear about it and report it on the blog. BUT …

The banding system is about to collapse. The “Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed the House on 22 May, will eliminate BBL and its home, the Eastern Ecological Science Center in Laurel Maryland.

“The U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, now called the Eastern Ecological Science Center, will be closed if the Congressional budget passes in its current form [NOTE: it passed on 22 May],” said Gregg Petersen, president of the Howard County Bird Club. “The center was started in 1923 and became the gold standard for wildlife research for the world.” It is home to the USGS Bird Banding Lab, which supplies bands and manages banding data on a national level.

— Business Monthly: federal cuts could end wildlife research labs in Laurel, across U.S.

If the bill passes the Senate in its present form, the BBL will close and there will be no national coordination, collection and reporting of banding data. So we will not hear about our banded birds in the future.

Perhaps your Senators don’t know about the importance of BBL. They are probably busy, though. The BBL is small potatoes compared to the bigger issues in the Big Beautiful Bill.