A Stirling Recovery

Most of our recoveries that come from people, other than ringers, are mostly submitted to us via the Euring website. We do still receive a few phone calls however, and every now and then the recovery they are reporting is quite unusual.

I recently had a call from a lady who found a little bird in her garden in Bridge of Allan, Stirling (blue pin (behind the red pin) on map). She wasn't sure what this bird was but thanks to the ring number it all became clear. It was a Bullfinch that had recently died near her garden shed.

Female Bullfinch by Ms McGibbon

Bullfinch don't generally move very far, apart from a few Northern Bullfinches that come into the country from Scandanavia during the winter. These are notably larger than our British Bullfinch.The amazing thing about this bird was that it was ringed in December 2011 on our nature reserve here at BTO HQ (purple pin). Remarkably the finding place is just over 1km from the BTO Scotland office in Stirling (red pin)! At a distance of 517km it is the furthest movement of a Bullfinch ever recorded within the UK or Ireland. There are two birds that have travelled further than this but these are Northern Bullfinches which went to and from Sweden!


View Bullfinch recovery in a larger map

Thanks to Ms McGibbon for letting us know and for providing the photo.