"Birdlife in Lombardy - Activities and value of Ornithological Stations" is the title of a conference that was held last year 6 July in Gargnano, organized by the Lombardy Region. The conference was born from the need to establish a moment of meeting between research bodies, territorial institutions and ringers. L'ringing of migratory birds every year involves numerous professionals and enthusiasts and is an activity that leads to the collection of numerous data that are potentially of considerable interest as tools for guiding nature conservation policies, with particular reference to migratory species.
Ringing in Ornithological Observatories, essentially some roccoli, is an activity entrusted to public bodies by numerous conventions, including international ones. The repercussions of the ringing activity for scientific purposes are obviously very relevant since in addition to monitoring the health status of the various species, they allow to verify the periods of migration, a subject very dear to the European Community for establishing the sampling periods in the hunting calendars. The works of the conference were opened by Dr. Paolo Nastasio of ERSAF and saw the interventions of various experts who illustrated, in addition to the method of bird ringing, also that of visual counts. The debate at the end of the work has precisely compared these two methodologies.
The first, that of catches and ringing, used since 1929, provides an immense amount of data, but requires a very high effort of work, in the face of a very poor recapture yield. However, it is very useful for studying the biology of the species studied. Visual counting - a project in this sense has been pursuing it for some years Federcaccia Veneto - it allows to sample a much higher number of animals, therefore it provides an estimate more relevant to the real size of the species surveyed, but it does not allow to count the nocturnal migrants or the species that fly at high altitudes (Source FEDERCACCIA BRESCIA-THOUGHTSMAN).