Magnificent ''Mountain Finch'' !!

 My last post centered on Pat's efforts in his garden. Not to be outdone, other team members; notably Paul, Jenni, Gareth and Kevin have been putting in a tremendous effort both for themselves and some of our trainees working within the current rules. Between them they have ringed well over 500 birds at our various feeding stations in the area. They have ringed some excellent species including Yellowhammer, Linnet, Lesser Redpoll, Goldfinch, Siskin and Reed Bunting--but within their catches has been a small number of Brambling. The rest of this blog is devote to this very interesting species.

For those of you not familiar with Brambling, let's have a look at a smart male bird almost in full breeding plumage:-

As you can see, the bird is a finch, and as such it has a generic scientific name of Fringilla- which is the same generic name of one of our commonest finches- the Chaffinch. The specific name of the Brambling is montifringilla- meaning 'mountain finch'. 

So Fringilla montifringilla is the scientific name of the bird we know as the Brambling. But why mountain finch? Well it's a tad misleading-rather than mountain finch it should be thought of as the finch of high latitudes. If you look at a map of the breeding area of this species it shows a very large swathe of Europe and Asia north of a line of latitude starting approximately half way up the west coast of Norway stretching way to the east. Essentially then this bird breeds in northern latitudes, but in most winters, millions of them spread south to find food--they love beech mast. Birds at this time of year are gradually moving back north and can often appear in gardens because natural food is often hard to come by  and gardens offer an easy option. So keep an eye out for Chaffinch sized birds which are essentially orange and black--as you can see in the picture, with a prominent white line down the back -look carefully at the picture.

We have caught a handful of Brambling this year, but Paul hadn't caught any at his feeders--until this morning when one bird of a small group popped into a net. As he extracted it he noticed it was already ringed--and that the ring was unusually on the bird's left leg. It called for spectacles to be donned!! On careful examination back at base, the ring number was recorded as :- EP 21606; but the address to contact was Museum Norway Stavanger !! Brilliant--an adult male as in the picture above, which had been ringed somewhere in Norway and was on its way back. I will post more details when we have had the information back from the Norwegian ringing scheme.

Brambling are relatively easy to sex and age. Females are much less colourful as males as you can see in this bird:-

Ageing is on several plumage features but the following two photos demonstrate the most obvious clues within the tract of feathers we mention a lot in these items--the greater coverts:-

This adult male bird shows greater coverts ( shown within the white bracket) which all have jet glossy black feather centres 

In contrast this juvenile ( less than one year old) male bird shows a clear moult limit as we call it --where the new adult feathers (1) are jet black, whereas the old juvenile coverts which have not yet been moulted out (2) have grey matt centres:-

We're really looking forward to finding out more about our ringed Brambling-of which more soon I hope; and more about our other feeder catching at the weekend.