Can someone please explain the process of banding. Not necessarily the physical process, although I am interested in that too (Special tools, markings, supplies, etc.), but more specifically the logistics of everything. From what I understand, banding is intended to be a unique identifier of not only a breeder, but also other information such as parents, etc. How unique are we talking here? They can't be globally unique as I just don't see enough space or complexity to code that much information on a simple band. Maybe RFID. I mean if that was the case, we would need to be assigning something resembling the complexity of a "globalscape IPv6 address" to each bird and on top of that, there would need to be some central authority managing the address space to hand out allocations to different breeders around the world. While I am nerding out over the idea of something this complex and detailed, I just don't think it exists. So... what does exist in the real world? How are different breeders identified and how is overlap prevented and what is the geographic border of the overlap? Is it statewide? County? City? Or is it not even that complex. Perhaps the bands are just on a per breeder basis used for internal identification, ie their own internal breeding/numbering system. If that's not the case, where and how do you go about getting setup to start banding? I would eventually like to band my two finches for tracking purposes, and then eventually when I do decide to start breeding them, I'd like to be fully setup and ready to go. Thanks!