December 12, 2001

Bird's-eye view on banding

Environment program studies journey of birds

By LISA PERKINS
Herald staff writer
       Students in the "Ultimate Journey" program at the Boys and Girls Club of Traverse City got a chance to learn about the journey taken by the birds that visited their bird feeders last week.
      Retired biologist, Bill Scharf, Ph.D., demonstrated banding the birds for identification purposes to more than 20 children from the Blair Community Learning Center, Kingsley schools and regulars to the Boys and Girls Club.
      Scharf, a registered bird bander, set up mist nets Thursday near the feeders to capture visiting birds. After retrieving them, he demonstrated how to identify the species, sex and approximate age of the birds. The children helped release the birds after a numbered band had been put on its leg.
      Twenty redpoles, who summer near the Arctic Circle and winter in the Traverse City area, were banded and may now be tracked through a national computer registry.
      "We can tell where they go, how old they are and who they mate with. It helps us learn more about the different species," said Scharf who has banded more than 80,000 birds since 1964.
      Bird banding is only one of the topics children learn about in the "Ultimate Journey" environmental education program. Building bird houses, which will be sold when they are completed, and taking an up close and personal look at raptors when "Wings of Wonder" visited the center, are also part of the bird unit.
      "I called Mr. Scharf out of the blue, someone gave me his name and said he is the guy to talk to if you want to know about birds. I didn't know he would be able to show the kids so much about birds and identifying them," said Niki Dunwiddie-Kiss, coordinator of the "Ultimate Journey" program.
      "We all learned a lot, it was great to have a hands on demonstration," she noted.
      Fourteen-year-old Amanda Engler, a student at Kingsley Middle School, shared that sentiment.
      "It was really cool to learn about where the birds came from, how they traveled so far to come here for the winter. We usually think about birds leaving here for the winter," she said.