Contact with the Israeli Ringing Scheme!

We have just introduced a system of sending finding details of foreign ringed birds electronically to foreign schemes, reducing the time it takes to receive recoveries. One example of the this has been Lesser Whitethroat Y117288, which was caught by the NOA Ringing Group in Norfolk.

Once we had loaded the data and sent the file off to the Ringing Scheme we received the ringing details the next day! This bird was ringed in the Modiin Hills, Israel on 13th March 2009 as a second year bird, probably on its northward migration to this country and was caught here when it did it again the next year. This is a distance of about 3612km but obviously the bird had migrated all the way back in that time.


View Lesser Whitethroat in a larger map

Lesser Whitethroat is unique in that it uses this migration route which is not the usual route that many of our other migrants use through Spain. All five Israeli ringed birds recovered in Britain and Ireland have been Lesser Whitethroats and in addition we have had nine British-ringed Lesser Whitethroats found in Israel, three British-ringed Gannets in total and, oddly, a leg of a Black-headed Gull found in a plane at Tel-Aviv Airport.

This is the sixth ever recovery of an Israeli Lesser Whitethroat, three being caught by ringers, one dying in a factory at Weston-Super-Mare and one hitting a window near Gloucester.

Thanks to NOA Ringing Group and Dawn Balmer for the photo.