I've got 8 goose bands on my lanyard these days as well, and about a dozen ducks. My original lanyard with all my bands killed in younger days went missing when somebody broke into my truck and stole my shooting bag. There were half a dozen more geese and about the same in ducks including a wood duck band and a Jack Miner goose.
I used to know a couple guys from Kentucky that had double and triple strings of wood duck bands. They lived in an area that did huge studies on them and banded hundreds every year. So in the early season, nearly every one they killed had a band. My wood duck band actually came out of this area but I killed it in Illinois.
My teal band has a fun story. We were hunting opening morning in Ontario a few years ago. One of the guys with us took a snap shot at a bunch of bluewings that buzzed by and knocked one down. Well don't you know it was banded, first teal band I'd ever seen shot. Exactly a week later, on the exact same point, with the exact same group of hunters, I did the exact same thing, but on a bunch of greenwings. Mine was banded as well! We figured they'd both been banded recently right there on the lake. Well we were wrong big time, his had been banded on the prairie as a duckling and mine had been banded the January before in South Carolina.
Off that same point a couple season before I killed a mallard drake that was banded. He'd been ringed exactly 30 days before on an almost perfectly straight line dead west of there in Wisconsin. I think he must have been lost, he certainly wasn't traveling anything like south anyway.
Up in Quebec they do a lot of banding on the area we hunt so every year we always get at least one band. There are a ton of blacks up there and I'm sure they band them as well but I've never seen one shot that had a ring. Every one we've ever killed that was locally done was a mallard drake. Don killed a hen mallard three years ago but it had been banded in Vermont! I guess they just band drake mallards in Quebec, it's kind of weird......
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I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough; swore little; diced not above seven times a week; went to a bawdy-house once in a quarter--of an hour; paid money that I borrowed, three of four times; lived well and in good compass: and now I live out of all order, out of all compass. Falstaff - Henry IV
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