Pat off to a flying start!!

 It's great to see any newly qualified ringer really getting to grips with their hobby and making the most of new opportunities. So it is with Pat who got his C permit around Christmas along with settling in to a new home just west of Welshpool. It quickly became apparent that his garden was a bit of a magnet for birds-especially Siskins which have a good population in many parts of Wales. 

In early January the BTO issued guidance which strongly urged all ringers to ring only in your own garden. This meant Blue Tits, Great tits and the odd finch for many of us--but for Pat this was a great time to really get used to ringing a wide range of garden birds on his own. Looking at his monthly ringing totals he has gradually become more confident and currently his garden total for this year stands at 415 new birds of 19 species!!

Of these the most abundant species is Siskin, with a superb 218 ringed. Goldfinch at 22, Starling at 11 and Greenfinch at 10 are a great supporting cast.

Having said that there is a healthy breeding population of Siskin in Wales, there is supporting evidence from what Pat describes as a cold foggy morning in March when along with plenty of un-ringed birds he caught 4 birds which had been ringed elsewhere:-

3 of them had been ringed variously over the last three years within a 25 mile radius of his house. However, the fourth bird had been ringed in June 2017 near Inverness--almost 500 miles away. So, as well as local birds, there is a wide ranging movement of Siskins going on with birds from all over the UK and Europe moving around searching out food sources during late winter--which makes this species such an interesting and exciting one to study.

Pat has also taken some great pictures of Siskins which serve to show how, even in the field it's possible ( given a decent view) to sex them ( quite easy) and age them up to 1 year old ( a bit more tricky). I hope these pictures illustrate the key features for you to try at home--if you have any Siskins feeding of course!

Here is an adult ( more than 1 year old) bird-the white line shows the greater covert feathers which are all yellow tipped

This is a juvenile male bird and the white mark shows that if you look carefully the outer 2 or 3 greater coverts are both shorter than the rest and white tipped

This is a female Siskin--no black cap, not brightly coloured and a streaky breast and belly. The line also shows that the outer group of greater coverts are much shorter than the rest--making this a juvenile female.

This is a slightly trickier bird. The cap is black but the feather tips of the cap are pale and the overall colour of the bird is not very striking. However, the breast and belly are not as streaked so it's not a female. Finally the white line shows the outer greater coverts are shorter and white tipped --showing this to be a (very) juvenile male.

Thanks for these pictures Pat!

Up and Runn........Walking

 We are so sorry for the lack of material over recent weeks. The lockdown conditions up until recently meant that we were strongly advised to only ring birds in our own gardens. For most of us that meant catching not very much if anything, although Pat out in Wales has had an exciting time because he has a good population of Siskin feeding in his garden and he has had quite a few potentially interesting controls of Siskins ringed elsewhere. I'll report on that when we have more details.

Since the ease of rules a little while ago, we have been able to respond to our good friend and farm manager Tim, who has recently been awarded Innovative Farmer of the Year on top of a previous Soil Farmer of the Year award. Tim is really keen on knowing how his 'no till' strategy is benefiting the birds and so he was really enthusiastic about us being able to survey his land-especially the area around a new winter feed 'spinner' mechanism:-

This mechanism enables us to stay away from the site for a few days as the hopper is filled with supplementary winter feed which the underlying mechanism spins periodically and sprays the seed out over a small area. It also has a solar panel to power the mechanism. The birds quickly get used to the undisturbed provision of lots of food!

The set up has been very successful in attracting farmland species and in just a small number of recent visits we have managed to ring a very significant 71 Yellowhammers!! This is around as many of this species as were ringed in many years in the whole of Staffordshire. It's great news that winter supplementary feeding stations like this and others are helping Yellowhammers survive over winter and we hope go on to breed in the area. Other interesting totals were 27 Linnet, 25 Chaffinch, 20 Goldfinch and 11 Reed Buntings.

A Yellowhammer

Many people know that feeding stations in their gardens also attract predators such as Sparrowhawks to the many small birds feeding there. It's no different to our farmland feeding stations where both Sparrowhawks and Kestrels have been seen. Our resident male Kestrel ( aka Kenny as we call him) got himself caught one morning:- 

He's a superb specimen and a very successful breeder having fledged 10 youngsters in the last 3 years on the farm, and we have already seen him 'food passing' to his mate  which is a sure sign that they are getting ready to rumble!! One of the reasons they are able to raise good sized broods is in great part due to the higher than average numbers of small mammals on the site--yet another benefit of the no till strategy. Every night when we survey the farm using the thermal imager it's really noticeable how many mice we see compared to the fields on nearby conventionally ploughed farms.

Another new record!!

 The recent posts have explored an exciting period where we have received word of birds we have ringed which have been found elsewhere--always an intriguing time. The Willow Warbler controlled in France was a new record for us, and just yesterday another new record was established when a Common Whitethroat ringed at Belvide was also controlled in France- our first Whitethroat control in 40 years!! 

As you can see it's not a great distance from here, but it is consistent with the known migratory path of Common Whitethroat. They tend to fly in a south south westerly direction and spend the winter just south of the western Sahara in a region of semi desert called the Sahel. Birders and ringers in the late 60s noted a big decline in the number of Whitethroats in the UK and after some research it was found that the Sahel had suffered a series of drought years which was having a significant effect on the winter survival of those birds wintering there and hence the numbers returning to breed. I'm not sure if the conditions in the area have improved since then, or that the species has evolved to use a different wintering area, but their numbers are gradually increasing, and this year with over 70 birds ringed at Belvide we had a record year for Common Whitethroat--long may that continue.

Just like London Buses!!!

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.??

Some more Home Thoughts from Abroad......

 

 Just this morning we had notifications from 3 of our birds ringed at Belvide but re-caught (controlled as we call it) abroad. In all these cases from France--great news to brighten a dull, dank, lock-down day at home!!

In one respect the more interesting recovery was that of DYD615. This is the number on the ring carried by a juvenile Willow Warbler ringed at Belvide on 18th July 2020.

It seems like it was already preparing to migrate because on 20th August 2020 it was controlled by a ringer in the Gironde region of France, 830km away from Belvide.

Although this doesn't really push back any frontiers of science, it is yet one more bit of evidence about when species migrate, their timing and the routes taken. For the Belvide team it's also exciting in that it's the first Willow Warbler that we have had controlled anywhere.

The other two controls were both Sedge Warblers, and add to the increasing bank of evidence we have about the initial route taken by our Belvide Sedgies.

The first is a juvenile Sedge Warbler AJN0975, which we ringed on 31st August 2020. There's no way of knowing if this was a bird which had been reared at Belvide or was dropping in to feed on it's way south. However, on 9th September it was controlled by a French ringer in the Loire-Atlantique region of France 597km south.

The second Sedgie was ringed by us on 29th July 2019 at Belvide and controlled at the same site as the previous bird on 30th July 2020!

These two birds follow a now well established pattern of 'our' Sedge Warblers setting off in a generally southerly direction and stopping off at sites in northern/central France probably for theur first refuelling stop en route to sub Saharan Africa. This second bird also demonstrates how early some birds can be well on with their migration--it was still only July when it was caught in France.

Here's a map showing these controls so you can better see where these tiny birds were recaptured

 

An intriguing Redwing recovery

 

A Story about Redwing RZ26165

Back in October 2016, BSM 8040 Partership group members put in a lot of effort to ring 602 Redwings which were gathering in big numbers on Cannock Chase. This site is now run by the West Midlands Ringing Group and the ringer of the actual bird described below is now a member of that group.

One of these Redwings (bearing ring number RZ26165) has been reported from a rather exciting place. The map shows the original ringing site on Cannock Chase on 20^th October 2016, and the finding site which is in Ashinsky District, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia some 3896 kilometres away!! This is one of the most easterly recoveries on record and as such is pretty significant in itself. Only the leg of the bird with the ring on it was found and no details were provided by the finder about how long the bird had been dead prior to the ring being found on 15^th July 2019.

 We have not linked the two sites by a line as is often shown on these repots, because this implies that the bird flew from one site directly to the other; and we are pretty sure that it didn’t do that. So here we have the essence of the fascinating back-story and the puzzle of unravelling it which illustrates beautifully the strengths and weaknesses of the ringing process. On the one hand, if birds like this had not been ringed we would have had no idea of the range and scale of movements undertaken by Redwings. This is one of the major strengths of the current scheme. On the other hand, however we are left guessing about what movements the bird carried out between ringing and finding. Although this is a shortcoming, the fact that over the years we have built up a picture based on lots of other similar recoveries is a strength. Fortunately we can speculate on the movements of RZ26165 based on this large number of recoveries.

The map shows the breeding area of Redwings in northern European taiga forests. It’s pretty certain that our bird was hatched somewhere in this area in summer 2016 because it was aged as a juvenile when ringed. It then moved out during early autumn along with millions of others and found its way to Cannock Chase where we ringed it. Now we get to the speculative phase of the story. The bird will either have stayed somewhere in the UK during the winter—or perhaps carried on south into France or Spain. During late Spring 2017 it will probably have flown back to northern Europe—maybe to its natal area where it most probably will have bred. We have no idea where it went during the winter of 2017/18.

The data bank of Redwing recoveries suggests that individuals can vary the direction and destiny of their winter quarters year on year. So we speculate that our bird set off after breeding from northern Europe again in autumn 2018, but this time it set off in a south easterly direction. We speculate that it spent the winter in south eastern Russia but before it could migrate back to its breeding grounds in spring 2019 it met its end—probably being killed by a predator. Later in that year, July in fact, the leg and ring were found and details sent to the BTO.

Quite how true this story is, is debateable, but it is based on the evidence we have in the system. But in truth we will never know about this particular bird’s movements. In fact we will not know these details for sure until we are able to fit satellite trackers to small birds. This will happen in the near future we believe and then we will get some incredibly detailed data on the precise whereabouts of tagged birds during their movements through the year—we can’t wait!!

And----They're Off!!!

 Goodbye and good riddance 2020 !! In fairness we had a very good ringing year notwithstanding the various lock-downs and restrictions.We will be posting some of our ( many) ringing headlines in a couple of days, and shortly after that we will also post a copy of our 2020 Annual Report.

Until that data is ready, I dusted off my garden net and got the 2021 new ringing year of to a start this morning. Numbers have been building up at my feeding station so after giving many birds a chance to feed early doors, I opened my net just after 10 am. Within a couple of hours I stopped to let the birds carry on feeding but in that time I had ringed a very encouraging 25 new birds. 

11 of them were Goldfinch, and 8 were Greenfinch. This reflected the ratio of birds I've been getting recently. Goldfinches are really interesting. I still remember the first I ever caught in a garden at a previous house--in 1984!! In those days this was a rare catch in gardens but since then Goldfinches have become regular on garden feeders--probably due to the range of more suitable foods for them such as sunflower hearts and niger seed.

Greenfinches are a species that I have ringed many hundreds of over the years--but in the recent past their numbers plummeted due to a lung disease--so it is great to see their numbers building up again. They are still not as common as they used to be but the trend is in the right direction. When the Covid rules allow it I will be having trainees over to my house because these two species pose interesting challenges in terms of ageing and sexing.

The rest of the catch was not especially remarkable, except for this little beauty:-

This of course is a female Blackcap. As readers will know we ringed in excess of 1000 of these migrants during the summer--so what was this bird doing here now? Well I'm sure some of you will know that as our winters have generally warmed up, more and more Blackcaps are being recorded-especially in gardens. The range of foods helps here--especially high energy fat balls. Ringing has shown that these are NOT birds from the UK deciding to stay on over the winter. Rather they are Eastern European in origin ( and also, bizzarely, some birds from central France !!??). So it would be great news if someone in, say Poland, were to catch this bird next summer!! I wish......

Look out for more news as soon as I have the data.