rideauwrangler said:
I've never heard of this; who pays the reward? I take it that the $ is an incentive to report on the harvest location?
We got a $50 band on a snow goose a couple of weeks back, and my dad, a biologist, explained the reasoning behind the money bands.
They use it to judge the normal band reporting rate - they issue an identical number of reward bands in different amounts - say 100 each of $5, $10, $20, $50, $100, $500 (all those are just hypothetical).
The assumption is that anybody who finds the highest value band will return it, but as the value of the band decreases, the reporting rate declines - so they graph the reporting rate for each denomination and assume that that graph continues through to the regular bands.
So for those 100 bands at $500, $50, and $5, lets say 50 of the $500 are returned, 45 of the $50 are returned and 35 of the $5 are returned - that would suggest that maybe around 30-35 of the no-pay bands would be reported, or in other words, between a 60-70% total reporting rate for all bands that are found.
As for who pays it - I'd guess it comes out of North American migratory bird license revenues.
Here's more info; h ttp://www.deltawaterfowl.org/research/bios/banding.php
