We have joined the Neighborhood Nestwatch through the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.
Today, representatives from the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies came to our house to catch birds on their targeted watch list. We caught two: a male and female pair of chickadees.
The birds have now been banded both with an aluminum band with a number (in case they are ever recaught elsewhere, they will be in the registry) but also with colored bands so that we can visually spot them to record resightings.
In addition to keeping an eye on “our” birds, we will also be keeping track of nests on our property of all birds (not just the targeted ones.) We currently have two house finch nests on our back porch and one house sparrow nest in a bird box on our front porch. (We had a third finch nest on a post on our front porch but it was a casualty of the hail storm a few weeks ago, breaking all four eggs.
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The girls loved it. We’ve watched bird banding twice at a local state park but it is even more fun when it is “your” birds. 
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Each of the girls got to gently pet one of the birds and also help release the birds (the biologist put the bird on their hands after banding and taking measurements and then it flew away.) You can see the little girls’ delight in the last picture after their bird flew into a nearby tree.
We will now keep recordings of sightings of our banded chickadees and also nesting activities (for any and all birds in our backyard). It’ll be fun to be able to recognize our specific little chickadees in the future vs. the other ones that hang around! The biologists will come back next year and do another catching/banding session, too. And it’s all for science, which is an extra fun bonus.
The banding of the birds reminds me of when my brother and sisters and I were young and we used to like to catch toads in our yard. We would use colored permanent markers and put a small stripe down their backs to mark them so we could recognize them if we caught them again.