History
The earliest recorded attempt to mark a bird was made by Quintus Fabius Pictor. These Roman officers, during the Punic Wars around 218-201 BC, were sent a crow by a besieged garrison, which suggests that this was an established practice. Pictor used a thread on the bird's leg to send a message back. A knight interested in chariot races during the time of Pliny (AD 1) would take crows to Volterra, 135 miles (217 km) away and release them with information on the race winners. L'Ecuyer went on to mark hundreds of crows in his lifetime while Pictor's interest quickly waned.
Falconers in the Middle Ages would fit plates on their falcons with seals of their owners. From around 1560 or so, swans were marked with a swan mark, a nick on the bill.
Storks injured by arrows (termed as pfeilstorch in German) traceable to African tribes were found in Germany in 1822 and constituted some of the earliest evidence of long distance migration in European birds.
Ringing of birds for scientific purposes was started in 1899 by Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen, a Danish schoolteacher. He used zinc rings on European Starlings. The first banding scheme was established in Germany by Johannes Thienemann in 1903 at the Rossitten Bird Observatory on the Baltic Coast of East Prussia. This was followed by Hungary in 1908, Great Britain in 1909 (by Arthur Landsborough Thomson in Aberdeen and Harry Witherby in England), Yugoslavia in 1910 and the Scandinavian countries between 1911 and 1914. In North America John James Audubon and Ernest Thompson Seton were pioneers although their method of marking birds was different from modern ringing. Audubon tied silver threads onto the legs of young Eastern Phoebes in 1803 while Seton marked Snow Buntings in Manitoba with ink in 1882. Paul Bartsch of the Smithsonian Institution is credited with the first modern banding in the U.S.: he banded 23 Black-crowned Night Herons in 1902. Leon J. Cole of the University of Wisconsin founded the American Bird Banding Association in 1909; this organization oversaw banding until the establishment of federal programs in the U.S. (1920) and Canada (1923) pursuant to the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916.
Read more about this topic: Bird Ringing
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