I suspect that it would be quite difficult to control for that, since my understanding is that they specifically use different color combos on each bird in a specific area. This lets the scientists easily ID the bird by sight or in a photo, vs. all silver bands with a stamped code. The latter would require them to re-catch the bird to ID it, defeating the purpose of observing behavior and IDing individuals as it happens. I would also guess that it isn’t really a factor in the birds’ behavior, though.
Yeah, I think this is 100% it but I’m not aware of any standards. I have spent a bit of time watching wildlife ecologists do bird banding at one site and they had a log of all the rings, so they could identify them by sight. Because there are limited color combinations, they segmented by species, sex for some species to make it easier. Common CS algorithms show up everywhere in the real world :)
I wonder if different ecology/conservation groups coordinate their algorithms and databases.
I participated once, but oh my god was it terrifying. The care with which one needs to remove the bird from the net and handle it is unnerving, especially with tiny songbirds. Weighing them is really cute. Massive respect for people who do it day in and day out.
I have a friend who worked on a project here in NZ where he made bird boxes with built in scales. It had a solar panel and a LoRa to get results back to base. It had a series of calculation to work out how much feeding was going on etc. From memory the boxes are on Hauraki Gulf islands - Tiritiri Matangi is one location I think.
