North American Bird Banding Program

The North American Bird Banding Program (NABBP), along with its Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL), has its home at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. The program is jointly administered by the Canadian Wildlife Service (and its Bird Banding Office) and the United States Geological Survey. The program is responsible for many aspects of bird banding in the United States and Canada: it grants permits to bird banders, fills orders for bands of various sizes, collects data from banding stations, receives reports from people who have found birds carrying bands, and makes its database available to appropriate parties.

The Patuxent center also operates its own banding station on the refuge grounds.

North American naturalists in the nineteenth century made efforts towards banding birds for later identification. In 1803, John James Audubon tied silver wire around the legs of nestling eastern phoebes and found two of the birds on their return to Pennsylvania the following spring. In Manitoba, Ernest Thompson Seton used printer's ink to mark snow buntings in 1882.

It is Paul Bartsch of the Smithsonian Institution who is credited with the first modern banding in the U.S.: he banded 23 black-crowned night herons in 1902.Leon J. Cole of the University of Wisconsin founded the American Bird Banding Association in 1909; this organization oversaw banding until the establishment of federal programs in the U.S. (1920) and Canada (1923) pursuant to Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916. The relevant legislation, respectively, is the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and the Migratory Birds Convention Act.

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