Acronyms. They can drive you crazy.
MAPS = Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship.
JANY = Jamestown Audubon New York

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker Siblings - banded at Tom LeBlanc's SWAT (MAPS) Banding Station in Allegany State Park
There are also four-letter codes for the bird names. These are abbreviations, not acronyms.
This is an AMRO – American Robin
Someday, he might look like his daddy:
This particular HOWR had a beak that didn’t line up properly:
Shall we call her a HOWR with a CRBI (crooked bill)?
Now, you might be thinking, “Oh, I get it! Use the first two letters of the first name and the first two letters of the second name. Easy!”
Not so fast…
This one (from last week) is a YWAR – Yellow Warbler – which I don’t get. There is no other bird called YEWA, so why YWAR?
The hyphenated names, too, get weird, though some are logical – like Tom’s Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers above. They are, of course, YBSA.
This week, we were most delighted to recapture this fellow:
He is the one that got away last week before weighing and before pictures, for which we teased poor Eric mercilessly. And we made him hold the bird for pictures:
I had to leave at 7:45am to go to work. I’m sure they caught lots more COBI (cool birds) after I left. (I made that last one up myself!)
Funny co-incidence . . . it looks like BBL has just changed the alpha code for yellow warbler to YEWA. It makes some sense, but doesn’t that collide with the breeding population of yellow wagtails (YWAG) up in Alaska?