From across the pond

Britain and Ireland are part of the East Atlantic Flyway, so we regularly get a few high Arctic breeding birds from Greenland or Canada in our country like Greenland Wheatear, Barnacle Goose, Pink-footed Goose or Purple Sandpiper.

The majority of recoveries are of Brent Geese (66%), but 19 species have been recorded either coming from, or going to, North America, Canada or Greenland (the latter is covered by the Denmark Ringing Scheme).

Brent Geese have been excluded from the pie chart to better illustrate the other species involved.

These are not all recent recoveries however. The oldest report is from 18 July 1948 (juvenile Arctic Tern ringed in the Bay of Fundy and found by Lairg, Highlands three months later). Due to a colour ringing project on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, we have received quite a few Turnstone reports (37% of the total). Several species stand out, including Great Shearwater (one caught by a trawler and the other caught on a boat), Peregrine (downed by a falconer's Peregrine) and a Caspian Tern (found dead).

Below are a few examples of more recent recoveries :

Ringed Plover - you may remember that Ringed Plovers from Canada have been featured recently on the Demog Blog, so we have several reports of them.

Ringed Plover. Photo taken by Lee Collins

Green-winged Teal - one turned up on the Hayle estuary, Cornwall on 9 November 2016 and it didn't take long to notice it was ringed! It took the Cornish ringers and birders quite a while to get enough photos of the bird to get the ring number, but finally on 19 January 2017 they had enough to trace it. Amazingly this bird was ringed as an adult in Quebec in August 2015!

Green-winged Teal. Photo taken by Anne Carrington-Cotton

Knot - in February we received a report of a dead Knot at Old Hunstanton, Norfolk. The likely ringer would have been the Wash Wader Ringing Group but the ring was clearly from the American Ringing Scheme. American rings are also used in Canada, which is probably where this bird was ringed. If this is the case, then this would be the 10th Canadian ringed Knot to be found in Britain or Ireland. Several BTO staff travel to Delaware every year for their holiday to ring 'Red Knot' as part of the Delaware Shorebird Project, so there was quite a 'flap of excitement' until it became clear that it was not one of theirs. We, and the finder, are awaiting the ringing details from the scheme.

Recoveries from the States are still very few and far between so each one is unusual in itself. The information from the tagged Ringed Plovers will be very interesting to follow in the coming years.

For more information on the movements of birds look at our Online Ringing and Nest Recording Report on our website.

A splash of gold

Back in March BTO Ringer Roy Pearson ringed a Goldcrest in his garden and has recently received some exciting news about his Goldcrest.

At 09:00 on 25/03/2016, I ringed a female Goldcrest in my garden in Boston, Lincolnshire. The bird weighed 6.9g.


Female Goldcrest. Photo taken by Anne Carrington-Cotton

This was subsequently caught by a ringer at 08:00 on 02/04/2016 at Griefswalder Oie, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.  This is close to the Baltic Sea and the Polish border, a distance of 931 km from where it was ringed (see map below). The duration was an amazing 8 days.

This is all the more remarkable as I ring very few Goldcrests in the Fens and is only the second recovery of this species in nearly fifty years of ringing.  The other recovery was also this year, but on this occasion the distance covered was merely a few hundred metres.

 

Eds write:

 

A ringer is nearly twice as likely to catch a foreign ringed Goldcrest in this country than to have a BTO ringed one found abroad. Around 22% of BTO-ringed foreign recoveries are found in The Netherlands followed by France (19%), then Belgium (16%). The bird in Roy's report is also one of the most-travelled BTO-ringed Goldcrests.

 

In a month's time we should reach the peak in Goldcrest sightings, as shown by BirdTrack (below); the sightings are currently following a similar reporting rate to last year (however there was an unusually high number of birds reported last October as previously posted). So if you see a ringed Goldcrest and are up for a challenge, have a go at reading the ring (usually 6 digits). It might have words like 'Norway or 'Sweden' as well.