Hirundine study.

 What are 'hirundines'? Well they are members of the Swallow and Martin family--but NOT Swifts which come from a completely different genetic stock.

For the first time this season, we caught a decent number of hirundines this morning and I'd like to show you some pictures to point out some features:-

First here is a Swallow:-

This is s juvenile bird--fledged a few weeks ago. You can tell by two key features. First the tail has very short ( almost non-existent) streamers on the outside feathers. And second the forehead and throat are buffy orange--if it had been adult these areas would have been deep red in colour.

Now a couple of pictures of the smaller Sand Martin:-

Considering they are basically brown and white, these really are delightful creatures. This is a juvenile bird and it can easily be aged as such by the buffy brown edges to quite a few wing and back feathers as shown clearly here.

The wing shown below is on an adult Sand Martin and you can see there are no buff edges to any of the feathers:-

Now three House Martin pictures.....

Here again it's a juvenile. One obvious feature is the rather matt appearance of the feathers ( especially the head) as opposed to the shiny blue feathers of the adult. However, there is another even more obvious feather on the inner feathers of the wing ( the tertials):-

These are the three overlapping feathers which if on a juvenile bird like this are all edged with a white crescent.

Just out of interest, House Martin legs are covered in downy feathers!!

None of the other hirundines have this feature and although there are some theories around I'm not convinced that anyone has proved why House Martins do. Ideas on a postcard please.

The build up of birds at Belvide continues and today we ringed 106 new birds--96 of which were migrants--some of which may already have dropped in on their way south because reports are coming in that migration has started even though it's still only July.

Even though we will be concentrating mostly on southward migration over the coming months, team member Pat has just had a couple of intriguing reports of birds he's ringed. Pat lives just west of Welshpool in Wales, and regular readers will have heard me talk about his garden as 'Siskin City'. Over recent months he has ringed 616 using one net in his garden--phenominal!! 

The map shows the recovery details of just two of these......

Incredibly, one bird which was ringed in Pat's garden on 8th March was re-caught by a ringer in west central Scotland on 1st July.

The second was ringed on 11th May in his garden and caught by the same ringer at the same place in Scotland on 23rd July. The movement of the first bird is probably of a bird moving north to breeding grounds--but the much later date of original capture of the second bird is a tad more difficult to explain. Answers on a postcard please...