American Oystercatcher Banding and Re-sighting

Since 1999, over 6,000 American Oystercatchers have been banded in the U.S. and Mexico. Banding individual birds helps researchers learn about demographics, movement, habitat requirements. The Working Group maintains a database to provide a mechanism for researchers to efficiently enter and search records of banded American Oystercatchers. Members of the public can also report bands to the database through the form on this website. So far, there are over 75,000 resights reported in the database.

The Working Group has established a standardized banding protocol for all American Oystercatcher banding, which makes reading oystercatcher bands easier because band colors and codes are consistent across banding programs and observers can learn what to expect. The banding scheme has evolved through several iterations, and is presently to place duplicate field readable bands on both upper legs. Codes are three characters–letters, numbers, or a combination of both. Colors are assigned by U.S. state or country.

You can use the links to the left to learn more about how to read bands and then report your oystercatcher using the online report form. If you have seen a banded American Oystercatcher outside of the United States, please report it by emailing the date and location seen, observers’ names, flock size, coordinates (decimal degrees preferred), and photos of the birds (if there are any) to Lindsay Addison.