Having waited ages for a foreign recovery of any of our recently ringed birds, three came through a couple of days ago which I covered in the previous blog. Hot on the heels comes an absolutely unique recovery.
Kev ringed 24 Meadow Pipits at his racecourse site on 18th September2020. We've just had notification that one of them; Meadow Pipit ACP6508 was found on 16th October 2020 in the Landes region of south west France some 981km south of the racecourse!! The only unfortunate note is that the bird was found by a member of the public because the bird had been killed by a cat...…..
This is the first international recovery of a Meadow Pipit that our group has had in our 40 year history!!Notwithstanding this bird's unfortunate end, it does confirm what we thought--that many of the Meadow Pipits which we see in the UK move significantly south to spend the winter. Birders visiting Spain during the winter report many Meadow Pipits, especially in inland plains areas and it could well be that this bird was on it's way to central Spain. Even assuming it set off on the same day that Kev ringed it, and the reporter suggested the bird had been dead around a week before finding it--it had taken only a couple of weeks to travel almost 1000km. So there was plenty of time for it to cross into Spain if that's where it intended to spend the winter.
Here's a map showing where this bird was found:-
I wonder where our next recovery will be from.??
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