One of the feeding stations at Belvide has been attracting large numbers of Brambling over recent days, and we may be able to ring some in the next few days. This tends to happen at this time most years, as these birds are gradually feeding up and moving north before crossing the North Sea to breed in northern Scandinavia and points east.
Top birder Steve, saw this individual and took a great photo:-
The bright colours show it to be a male, but you can clearly see the ring on the bird's right leg. Knowing that we haven't ringed any Brambling at Belvide, Steve tried to get the details from the ring!! This took a lot of patience and some excellent digiscoping. Here is one of the pictures he took
From left to right you can see
ES99
TAV
Other pictures of the ring as it moved around on the leg and the bird posed in different positions, enabled us to put the whole sequence together, but even from this we knew the bird had been ringed in Norway, where all rings of this size begin with the letter 'E', and the TAV is the middle section of the ringing scheme centre at STAVANGER.
So that night I sent an email and the following day the Stavanger centre replied that the bird was ( as we suggested) a juvenile bird- flegded in 2021, and had been initially ringed in October last year at an observatory on the west coast of Norway called Revtangen.
It was a great bit of joint detective work between birder and ringer, and gave another bit of info about the origin of some of our birds. Steve has now got the bug and is checking out all the birds with rings on he sees at Belvide!! A couple of days ago he tracked down the ring number on a Reed Bunting, which had been ringed in 2016 at Belvide and till now hadn't been seen agai.
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