BaSTA – More fun than a Swedish sauna  One day, a few years ago,
I was drinking with some fellow biologists in “Seminar Room A”
opposite the Natural History Museum in Helsinki. The Sibelius
Academy is next door to the museum, so we shared the bar with
musicians. Once of the musicians came up to us with a plastic
bag, and gave it to us saying that they thought we’d know what
to do with it. In the bag was a dead gull. Well, the other
biologists knew what to do with it: it had a band on it so they
took that off its leg, and dumped the body. The band was sent to
the local banding centre, so they would know that the bird had
died. And another datum was added to the store of human
knowledge.  But what’s the point of banding birds and collected
the bands after the bird’s dead? Because it helps us learn about
how their populations are faring. We can learn a lot about
survival from this sort of data, particularly if it’s combined
with observations of birds when they’re alive. But this data is
quite messy, so it needs