Your layman’s guide to Pyle looks great, I may pass it on for some friends at the state Museum to use when they do banding workshops. Thanks!

I struggled with it the whole fall season. I came to be a competent bander by the end of it – my trainer would leave me to band on my own on slow days while he was checking nets, sometimes, though I still had some ways to go before I could apply for my permit. But I never felt comfortable with the book. That winter, ’round about January when I started feeling The Itch, I pulled out Pyle and decided to wade through the introductory material and finally teach myself the darned thing. It took a little while, and I sat there with my pencil underlining relevant lines and putting an asterisk beside important passages. I recall finally having an “a-ha!” moment in doing that, where all the things I learned in the fall finally made sense. Like having a board with puzzle pieces that fit into slots, and you’ve got them approximately lined up, but it just requires a little shake to make them all fall into place.

What was needed, I thought, was a version of Pyle’s introductions that was directed at the layman. Preferably with photos. There was a version of this already, sort of, in Dan Froelich’s companion guide, but I didn’t think he did a very good job with it. So that winter I sat down and wrote my own, using photos I’d taken over the fall. I went back and revised with additional photos taken the following year, finally polishing it up in early 2005. I printed two copies at the print shop, at a cost of $25 each. By that point I had my permit and was starting to train new banders myself. I’d start them out with lending them one of the printed guides.

I’ve been thinking about making the guide available through a print-on-demand site like Blurb, but haven’t gotten around to it, mostly because I wrote it so long ago I wonder if I should go back and replace some of the images with newer ones, though that would require updating a lot of the text, which I find offputting.

If you’re interested, you can download the pdf here: http://www.seabrookeleckie.ca/BandingGuide.pdf

It’s big, 8 meg, because it’s full of colour photos. It’s aimed at banders, but everything it says is relevant to the birder, too. It might help with making Pyle’s language a little easier to read (or, it might not offer anything you haven’t figured out for yourself already! who knows). These days the terminology is so ingrained that anytime I see short forms like PA Day for schools, I read it as “prealternate day” out of habit.

That comment got a little out of hand. Mostly I had intended to say that I agree about the Pyle guides – incredibly useful for those details that standard guides don’t go into. Now that I’m not banding regularly the guide doesn’t see as much use, but I still pull it down from time to time to look something up.