Her pain is your gain. When Erica Spotswood of the University of California at Berkeley applied to use a mist net in French Polynesia, officials asked for proof that the technique is safe. Despite the fact that the technique has been the research standard in ornithology for decades, Spotswood couldn’t find much data. So, she collected her own.

She found that mist netting is indeed safe, with injuries or deaths occurring in only a fraction of a percent of the birds captured. Best of all, the paper, in Methods of in Ecology and Evolution is open access. You can’t ask for more than that.

Read the paper here.

Some background on the study from ScienceDaily.

Photo: Not a bird in exotic French Polynesia, but a yellow warbler in the good old US of A. Photo Credit: Kristine Sowle, courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service

Her pain is your gain. When Erica Spotswood of the University of California at Berkeley applied to use a mist net in French Polynesia, officials asked for proof that the technique is safe. Despite the fact that the technique has been the research standard in ornithology for decades, Spotswood couldn’t find much data. So, she collected her own.

She found that mist netting is indeed safe, with injuries or deaths occurring in only a fraction of a percent of the birds captured. Best of all, the paper, in Methods of in Ecology and Evolution is open access. You can’t ask for more than that.

Read the paper here.

Some background on the study from ScienceDaily.

Photo: Not a bird in exotic French Polynesia, but a yellow warbler in the good old US of A. Photo Credit: Kristine Sowle, courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service