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Show Goose banding begins on Utah's marshlands to study migration receive any influx on geese from other areas. Our Canada Geese are harvested har-vested at a high rate and several sev-eral changes have been made in the management of this bird. Bag limits have changed from three birds to a low of one bird and are now back to two birds. A season limit was established in Canada Geese in 1965. Banding studies have shown that locally raised mallards go north to the Snake River Valley Val-ley to winter and pintails move into Southern California for the winter. Swans and Snow Geese are tied to Southern California as wintering areas and move to the Arctic for nesting. Waterfowl banding started nearly a half a century ago and is still used with modern refinements in today's waterfowl water-fowl management programs, according to John Nagel, Waterfowl Wa-terfowl Biologist for the Division Divi-sion of Fish and Game. Preseason banding is underway under-way on Canada Geese with the duck banding following. Two types of banding programs pro-grams have been established. Preseason banding of ducks and geese which is the program now underway and the postseason post-season banding of ducks, geese and swans which commences after the waterfowl season closes. Color marking of birds using plexiglass collars, feather dyes and back tags is a recent innovation inno-vation in the banding program. Birds marked with collars or dyes allow for visual observation observa-tion of these birds, speeding up the process of following their migrations, location of nesting areas and general life histories of the birds. Why banding programs? Nagel Na-gel pointed out this program gives information on migration to wintering areas or breeding grounds, where ducks are produced pro-duced and mortality rates, such as determining how much hunting hunt-ing pressure each species Of duck can stand. Today over 500,000 birds are banded annually in the United States. Over 1.5 million band returns have come In, mostly from hunters, providing data needed for waterfowl management. manage-ment. During the last 13 years, over 17,000 Canada Geese in the Great Basin Goose population popula-tion have been banded in Utah making this possibility the most intensively banded bunch of waterfowl in North America. Banding information has revealed re-vealed that the Great Basin Goose population is a local group of birds. What we raise here on Utah marshes is what we have to shoot. We do not |