Free The Owl That Fell from the Sky by Brian Gill Page B

on the bird band, and how many postal workers think the national museum is in Auckland. The result is a constant trickle of bands, or reports of bands, which we redirect to the banding office in Wellington.
    Other jurisdictions have also had trouble with inscriptions on bird bands. In the United States, bands at one time read “WASHINGTON BIOLOGICAL SURVEY”, abbreviated on smaller bands to “WASH. BIOL. SURV.” There is an apocryphal tale about an Arkansas farmer who wrote in to complain that, after he shot a banded crow, his wife followed the cooking instructions helpfully provided on the bird’s leg but the bird tasted horrible.
    Recovering and reporting bands from dead birds provides data vital to establishing movements and minimum ages of individual birds. In 1997 a common tern, Sterna hirundo , that had been banded in Finland was caught (and released again) on the Victorian coast of Australia after a journey, probably via South Africa, of over 26,000 kilometres, the longest documented journey of any bird. In New Zealand, the centralised national banding scheme began in 1950 and the millionth bird was banded in 1987. There have been over 400,000 recaptures or recoveries of banded birds, including a gannet, Morus serrator , that had travelled over 5,000 kilometres from Cape Kidnappers in the North Island to Western Australia, and a house sparrow, Passer domesticus , that had moved over 300 kilometres from Upper Hutt, north of Wellington, to Reparoa, midway between Taupo and Rotorua. A royal albatross nicknamed Grandma bred regularly at Taiaroa Head near Dunedin and the banding of this bird from 1937 established that it lived over sixty years.
    The banding office replies to every sender of a band, telling them where, when and at what age the bird was banded, and what the discovery shows. Unfortunately, many senders do not think to open and flatten the band—which is not easy to do anyway with the larger stainless steel bands —and instead post it in its circular state. I have received a few empty envelopes where the curled band has burst out during transit and been lost, along with its number. It is always advisable to note the band’s number in the accompanying letter. In most cases it is in fact enough just to report the number and keep the band.
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    Some enquiries we receive are trivial. People in a pub may be trying to settle an argument about the size of an animal. Others may want help to solve a crossword puzzle clue. Some callers seem unable to end their conversations. They move on beyond the original issue to other birds they have seen in their gardens, and perhaps, if you are not careful, to all the interesting birds they have ever seen on holidays at home and abroad.
    Not everyone accepts a curator’s advice. A man brought in what he believed was a fossilised bird’s head. When I told him that in my opinion it was just a rock —al though unquestionably a very interesting rock—he went into denial. “But look, you can see the eyes,” he insisted.
    Then there are the eccentrics. A woman rang to say that she had worked out why the Mayan temples were built, and did I know that catastrophic tragedies recur every 7,000 years? Once I received a letter that comprised a photocopy of a foreign postage stamp depicting a lizard. On the rest of the page, presumably for my personal benefit and future reference, were written out in capital letters various facts about the country and the lizard. But the strangest thing was that several places on both the letter and the envelope were rubber-stamped “CHECKED” and this notation was countersigned for added validity.
    One time when both marine curators were absent, the receptionist, as a last resort, put a call through to me from an elderly woman in a grumpy mood. She wanted to know the name of big jellyfishes that had been washing up in large numbers on the beaches of Auckland’s eastern suburbs. I am