A banded American Oystercatcher.

Photo by Erica Heusser

Resighting and Reporting Bands

Banding birds helps researchers learn about demographics, movement, and habitat requirements. In turn, this information can assist in identifying threats and limiting factors that managers and conservationists can work to address. Coordinated range-wide banding has been a cornerstone of the Working Group since its foundation.

To make resighting easier for observers, the Working Group established a standardized banding scheme for American Oystercatchers breeding in North America. Each oystercatcher receives duplicate field readable bands on its upper legs, improving visibility of the two- or three-character codes engraved on the bands. Since 1999, over 8,500 American Oystercatchers have been banded in the U.S.

The Working Group maintains the American Oystercatcher Band Database so site managers and researchers can efficiently enter and search records of banded oystercatchers. Members of the public can also report bands and look up oystercatchers they have seen previously. So far, there are over 122,000 resights in the database.

View Guide

Learn

If you are new to resighting banded oystercatchers, or banded birds in general, we have developed a guide to teach people how to read oystercatcher bands.
View Guide
Take Quiz

Test your knowledge

Now that you have reviewed the Band Resighting guide, get field ready and test your knowledge. Select the correct answer for each band code then hit submit and review answers to see how you did!
Take Quiz
Report Band

Report (within the U.S.)

Once you have found your first banded oystercatcher, you can report it at the band report form.
Report Band
Email Report

Report (outside the U.S.)

If you have seen a banded American Oystercatcher outside of the U.S., 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 at laddison@audubon.org.
Email Report
My Oystercatchers

Follow

You can look up oystercatchers you have previously reported and track their movements through the My Oystercatchers tool.
My Oystercatchers
View Guidance

Guidance for sites with productivity monitoring

If you are a professional site manager where oystercatchers are monitored closely throughout the nesting season, the Working Group has guidance for how and when to report bands and resources to make data entry faster.
View Guidance