COASSTers who have been with us for ~4 years will remember our transition from plastic zip ties to wooden tags for our beached bird survey program.
The wooden tags have served COASSTers well since we rolled-out new materials in 2020. Individual numbering has allowed us to continue to track refound birds, and the materials left behind by our surveyors have been biodegradable – a priority for our environmentally-focused organization.
But these tags have also presented problems, which we are now grappling with at COASST HQ.
- The tags are too attractive! Both casual beach walkers and state biologists have been known to collect these tags when they are found on our beached birds – removing them to report their find (similar to a band on a live bird) rather than leaving the tags in-place on the birds, as we would like.
- The tags are too expensive! When we first estimated the cost of production for our wooden tags, it was 2019. Labor and materials costs have skyrocketed since then, and there’s no way that we can sustain the costs of tag production at the scale of our beached bird program (thousands of tagged birds every year),
As we look towards 2025, we are considering alternative material options and bird tagging methods. If you have any ideas (or a tag-specific funding source) please write us! Thanks in advance for your support and input during this transition. We will ring in the new year with some tagging news for our beached bird surveyors.