uralists.)

Aspit,

read the lette mechanically i had been throwing scraps to the gulls nudged her companion and said, "Would you look at that poor thing's neck. I don't know how it can swallow."

Instinctively I shrank from this indignant woman. Although I never liked the look of the neck bands, always attributed my distaste to a transference of human feelings about constrictions around the neck. But, like most birders, I had no reason to believe that the neck bands were harmful. Casual observation of neck- banded birds had tended to support banders' claims that the birds func- tioned normally and were as strong and healthy as their unbanded kin. Rumours of other problems with the collars had lodged, like a raspberry seed in a tooth, somewhere at the back of my mind. Although I was not totally comfortable with the neck bands, I never gave them serious thought until November 21, 1987.

On that day, in Ottawa, balmy fall weather suddenly gave way to freezing temperatures and ferocious -winds. Sitting on the edge of the ice in the Ottawa River, facing the wind and spray, neck-banded Canada geese began to accumulate layers of ice on their collars. Eventually more than a dozen drowned, their heads pulled un— derwater by the weight of their icy collars. Ice on the neck band chopped off one of the surviving geese weigh- ed 3 kilograms.

The original decision to band Canada geese was made because of con— cern over a drop in the species' pop—

Gmc u Mm

I

In the shelter created by a small, a flock of Canada geese came skidding to a stop on the water. [band with black markings, of the flock. With my binoculars I could easily

r 1'1

From neck collars

BY MARION STREBIG

(Now is the time of year that we see collared Canada Geese on P.E.I. This story was originally published in the Spring 1988 edition of Seasons, a publication of the Federation of Ontario Nat—

man—made

One, wearing a yellow neck stood out from the rest

sequence, which I jotted down

my notebook. Nearby, a woman who ulation in the carolinas. Increas- ed hunting pressure at the South- ern end of their migration route had been put forward as one pos- sible explanation of this decline. If these states were to take the steps necessary to rebuild winter— ing populations, data would be needed to provide a better under— standing of migration patterns, wintering distribution and survi- val rate of the geese in the At- lantic Flyway. The resulting in— formation was to be used to ad- dress inadequacies of migration and wintering habitat and to estab- lish annual hunting rates in line wwith existing habitat conditions, the distribution of the birds and their reproductive potential.

Accordingly, between 1983 and 1986 more than 25,000 Canada geese in the Atlantic Flyway were banded with yellow collars imprinted with black letters. Taking part were the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and agencies in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and North and South Carolina. '

From the point of View of the agencies collecting data, the col— lars are attractive because they get ten times as many returns as leg bands (only 4-6 leg bands out of 100 are returned), and because the birds are observed alive and interacting normally with the flock. Two or three sightings of the same bird are often reported in a single