
Trump's budget would clip bird banding. Hunters are not happy.
The trophy may not last. The lab falls under the US Geological Survey's Ecosystem Mission Area, the agency's major ecology program, which under President Trump's 2026 proposed budget. would see funding reduced to $29 million from $293 million. Many hunters are unhappy at the prospect.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
'I just hate the thought of losing that,' said Eric Patterson, a duck hunter based in Alabama. 'It is an extreme measure to take.'
Mark Lindberg, a wildlife biologist who worked for the University of Alaska Fairbanks for 20 years, said that the cuts would have a lasting effect. 'We're going to go from being the most refined waterfowl harvest management system in the world — no comparison — to one of the least informed,' he said. Lindberg is also a hunter.
Each band reported by hunters is essential for detecting changes in waterfowl populations and for setting hunting regulations. In its contribution to waterfowl management, the Bird Banding Laboratory 'has given us something that is the envy of the world,' said Ramsey Russell, a duck hunter in Mississippi.
Advertisement
Capturing and handling live birds is prohibited by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, so the lab is also responsible for issuing permits to researchers and bird banders in the United States. The lab has a field station in Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland, and maintains a database of the millions of bands that have been placed on birds for more than a century, including how many times scientists and hunters have encountered an individual bird.
'Reporting of bird banding from hunters is one of the best citizen science programs that is out there,' said Brad Bortner, a retired wildlife biologist who worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service for 30 years and was its chief of migratory bird management.
Bird banding aids the management of bird species. When researchers place a band on a bird's leg, they also record information, including the animal's sex and age, and even measurements like weight or data drawn from tissue and blood samples. The data helps scientists track and understand a species' movements, habitat preferences, population growth, and more.
In turn, whenever a hunter, biologist, or other finders recover a band, they report it to the Bird Banding Lab, and that information is used to calculate the survival rate of the species. That data, along with surveys and hunting information from the previous year, informs the harvest management for ducks.
'We're not just killers,' Creasey said. 'We genuinely care about the resource and want it to thrive.'
Advertisement
The mathematical models behind duck regulations require that bands be placed on these animals every year, to guide the harvesting figures. 'If you skip it, you basically have no data out there,' Bortner said. 'And it causes real complications.'
Hunters treasure the bands they find, often placing them on lanyards and wearing them around the neck. Truck windows have been smashed to steal bird band lanyards. 'They do have a very intrinsic value, just personal value, to hunters, which is why the citizen science model works,' Russell said.
Typically, when hunters report a band, they receive a certificate with information about the specific bird killed. A band can reveal the complex narrative of a bird's migratory journey. Many hunters 'get a kick out of seeing where the bird came from,' Patterson said.
Many birds migrate between Canada and South America every year. To coordinate all of the data, the Bird Banding Laboratory works with the Bird Banding Office in Canada — which could be crippled if the American lab is defunded, said Chris Nicolai, a waterfowl scientist at Delta Waterfowl, a duck conservation nonprofit.
Nicolai noted that a significant portion of band data is collected, for free, by hunters, who also buy duck stamps to legally hunt waterfowl. The stamps, in turn, support habitat conservation.
'Hunters are paying for this information in several forms and then acting as scientists by collecting data for the information they paid for,' Lindberg said. 'It's a neat system that I really don't understand the criticism of.'
A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which manages the US Geological Survey, declined to comment directly on the cuts to the lab.
Advertisement
Congress must still approve the proposed budget. Bird organizations, including the American Bird Conservancy and the Ornithological Council, have expressed concern about the closure of the lab, as banding is also important in monitoring raptors, seabirds, songbirds, and other birds. Through banding, researchers have kept tabs on the oldest wild bird in the world, a female albatross named Wisdom, whose band number is 'Z333.'
For Bortner, the lab's uniqueness has made it vital. 'It's the only one,' he said.
This article originally appeared in
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Axios
17 hours ago
- Axios
AI's global race in the dark
The U.S.'s great AI race with China, now freshly embraced by President Trump, is a competition in the dark with no clear prize or finish line. Why it matters: Similar "races" of the past — like the nuclear arms race and the space race — have sparked innovation, but victories haven't lasted long or meant much. The big picture: Both Silicon Valley and the U.S. government now agree that we must invest untold billions to build supporting infrastructure for an error-prone, energy-hungry technology with an unproven business model and an unpredictable impact on the economy and jobs. What they're saying:"America is the country that started the AI race. And as president of the United States, I'm here today to declare that America is going to win it," Trump said at a Wednesday event titled "Winning the AI Race." Policy experts and industry leaders who promote the "race" idea argue that the U.S. and China are in a head-to-head competition to win the future of AI by achieving research breakthroughs, establishing the technology's standards and breaking the AGI or "superintelligence" barrier. They suggest that the world faces a binary choice between free, U.S.-developed AI imbued with democratic values or a Chinese alternative that's under the thumb of the Communist Party. Flashback: The last time a scientific race had truly world-shaping consequences was during the Second World War, as the Manhattan Project beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb. But Germany surrendered well before the U.S. had revealed or made use of its discovery. The nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union that followed was a decades-long stalemate that cost fortunes and more than once left the planet teetering on an apocalyptic brink. The 1960s space race was similarly inconclusive. Russia got humanity into space ahead of the U.S., but the U.S. made it to the moon first. Once that leg of the race was over, both countries retreated from further human exploration of space for decades. State of play: With AI, U.S. leaders are once again saying the race is on — but this time the scorecard is even murkier. "Build a bomb before Hitler" or "Put a man on the moon" are comprehensible objectives, but no one is providing similar clarity for the AI competition. The best the industry can say is that we are racing toward AI that's smarter than people. But no two companies or experts have the same definition of "smart" — for humans or AI models. We can't even say with confidence which of any two AI models is "smarter" right now, because we lack good measures and we don't always know or agree on what we want the technology to do. Between the lines: The "beat China" drumbeat is coming largely from inside the industry, which now has a direct line to the White House via Trump's AI adviser, David Sacks. "Whoever ends up winning ends up building the AI rails for the world," OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane said at an Axios event in March. Arguing for controls on U.S. chip exports to China earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described competitor DeepSeek as "beholden to an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they're able to match the U.S. in AI." Yes, but: In the era of the second Trump administration, many Americans view their own government as increasingly authoritarian. With Trump himself getting into the business of dictating the political slant of AI products, it's harder for America's champions to sell U.S. alternatives as more "free." China has been catching up to the U.S. in AI research and development, most tech experts agree. They see the U.S. maintaining a shrinking lead of at most a couple of years and perhaps as little as months. But this edge is largely meaningless, since innovations propagate broadly and quickly in the AI industry. And cultural and language differences mean that the U.S. and its allies will never just switch over to Chinese suppliers even if their AI outruns the U.S. competition. In this, AI is more like social media than like steel, solar panels or other fungible goods. The bottom line: The U.S. and China are both going to have increasingly advanced AI in coming years. The race between them is more a convenient fiction that marshals money and minds than a real conflict with an outcome that matters.


The Hill
2 days ago
- The Hill
Views from the front lines of Trump's war on the science community
The Trump administration has unleashed a tsunami of budget cuts to federal science programs. Mass firings have taken place at both the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, part of a deliberate decimation of research staff across the federal government. Since January, the administration has systematically cut science funding to its lowest level in decades and issued a flood of budget plans and executive orders that are reshaping how the government uses and supports science. Some outcomes have been immediate and tragic, including staffing shortages that have left cancer patients stranded during experimental drug trials and delays in approving COVID-19 vaccines. The extent of these actions is unprecedented. The administration for a time froze all grant funding at the National Science Foundation and abruptly terminated thousands of the ongoing projects that it funds, as well as those of the National Institutes of Health. As scientists at leading research institutions, we have personally witnessed the effects of the administration's policies — including colleagues relocating overseas and students leaving research altogether. Undergraduate science internship programs have been canceled, and graduate programs in many research universities paused. As a result, scientists are increasingly seeking jobs abroad. The administration claims its goals are to increase efficiency and raise the standards of scientific research. In fact, thousands of programs and projects have been cut solely on the basis of ideologically motivated keyword searches, without any concern for their performance, design or conduct. That's not efficient. A Trump executive order issued in May underscores the purely political nature of these attacks. Titled ' Restoring Gold Standard Science,' the order puts hand-picked presidential appointees into every agency to review and 'correct' any evidence or conclusions with which they disagree. That's not scientific. Further, many of the administration's policies effectively punish researchers simply for asking discomfiting questions and punish institutions for teaching about unpopular ideas. Viewed together, these outline a political strategy toward science that is both systematic and dangerous: a full-scale war on the scientific community, the network of individual researchers across many institutions whose collaboration is essential for scientific progress. Despite the media stereotype of a lone genius in a lab coat, science is really a communal activity. As Isaac Newton, one of the most important scientists of all time, wrote: 'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.' Every research project builds on foundational theory, tested methods and vetted findings created and refined through previous research. And every scientist depends on the distributed efforts of an extensive community to vet and review manuscripts for publication and proposals for new research, maintain common journals, databases and tools needed to share and build upon knowledge and educate and train the next generation of talent who help operate their labs. Institutions of higher education are the traditional hosts for the scientific community in the U.S, providing an independent forum for developing and refining ideas, an environment for training students and infrastructure for labs and shared resources. For more than 80 years, U.S. society has partnered with these institutions to foster a healthy scientific community. Federal funding enabled universities to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary for scientific research and support the most promising students. The scientific community collaborated to evaluate proposals for research across fields, ensuring resources were directed to the highest-quality projects, independent of political and institutional bias. No system is perfect, but the external scientific community has successfully partnered with the government to provide independent guidance and vetting — balancing competing interests and perspectives to evaluate proposals, advise the agencies that set funding priorities, accredit the programs that train researchers, review research findings and publish research results. Scientists within the government participate in the larger scientific community, reinforcing community standards as they move between jobs, and preserve the autonomy to ask scientific questions and share their findings. The administration's policies represent a three-fold attack on the scientific community. First, the administration aims to directly seize control over the key community functions that support scientific independence: Administrative actions have politicized the review processes for funding at National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, suppressed scientific data and withdrawn support for students. Second, the administration aims to subdue universities that provide an independent home for the community by weaponizing institutional accreditation and student visas, threatening individual institutions and their leadership when they are slow to align with the administration's ideology. Third, the administration is isolating scientists and scientific functions within the government. It does so by sidelining scientific expertise, firing entire independent expert advisory panels, canceling government access to scientific journals, preventing government scientists from publishing in them and, now, subjecting scientific analysis to systematic political modification and censorship. The government's war against science is a disaster for both. Without intellectual and political independence, the scientific community can't function effectively to discover new knowledge and solve hard problems. It's magical thinking for politicians to expect to receive truthful answers about the world when they poll to find the most popular answer, pay to get the answers they want or ignore data they dislike. And it's anti-democratic when political leaders dictate whether questions, data, and conclusions are appropriately scientific. Society needs science to tackle complex problems and to teach others how to do so. Science doesn't function without a healthy scientific community. As citizens, we should debate what problems are essential. As voters, we should decide which problems deserve public research funding. As free people, we should not tolerate political attacks on science and the scientific community. Micah Altman is a social and information scientist at MIT's Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship, MIT Libraries. Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.


The Hill
2 days ago
- The Hill
NASA slashing over 20 percent of workforce
NASA is slashing nearly more than 20 percent of its workforce as part of President Trump's efforts to downsize the federal government since returning to the White House. Nearly 4,000 workers have requested to depart the space agency through two rounds of the deferred resignation program. The deadline for the program was Friday at midnight. In the first round, about 870 employees have applied to leave and approximately another 3,000 workers did so in the second round — downsizing the workforce from 18,000 to around 14,000 people, NASA told The Hill's sister network NewsNation. The agency said the total number also includes the 500 workers who were lost due to normal attrition. 'Safety remains a top priority for our agency as we balance the need to become a more streamlined and more efficient organization and work to ensure we remain fully capable of pursuing a Golden Era of exploration and innovation, including to the Moon and Mars,' a NASA spokesperson said in a statement. A budget proposal from the White House, released in May, would reduce NASA's overall budget by 24 percent. The topline number would drop from $24 billion to $18 billion. Over 360 NASA employees sent a letter to their employer earlier this month, urging them not to make deep cuts, warning it will have 'dire' consequences. 'We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources,' the workers wrote. 'These cuts are arbitrary and have been enacted in defiance of congressional appropriations law.' The deferred resignation program was instituted throughout the federal government by Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to help slash the size of the federal workforce and cut down on costs, waste, fraud and abuse. NASA also experienced turbulence earlier this year as the president's first pick for the agency's administrator, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, was pulled in late May, days before he was set for a confirmation vote. Shortly after, Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk — who was the chief adviser for DOGE before he departed the White House — had a public falling out. Trump later tapped Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to be the interim NASA administrator, saying earlier this month that the former Wisconsin lawmaker is doing a 'TREMENDOUS job in handling our Country's Transportation Affairs, including creating a state-of-the-art Air Traffic Control systems, while at the same time rebuilding our roads and bridges, making them efficient, and beautiful, again.'