Icky went to Belgium

I hope you were able to celebrate World Migratory Bird Day over the weekend and that your field notebooks are now full of goodies to talk about. I thought I should tell you about a little migration story I found out about a few weeks ago.

Since the beginning of the Ringing Scheme a grand total of 1,091 Icterine Warblers have been ringed in the UK & Ireland. To my surprise only 5 of them have ever been recovered and reported to us, which meant that the report of an Icterine warbler with a BTO ring from Brussels was good enough to please the ringer (and the recoveries officer!)

Icterine warblers are normally passage visitors, with only a few confirmed breeding records in the UK. It is not surprising that practically all records of this species species are from the east coast. The graph below from sightings reported through BirdTrack shows that there is a small number of reports at the end of May-beginning of June during the spring migration, however, the majority of birds are reported in the fall migration from mid August.

On the 8th of June 2012 an Icterine Warbler (age 4) was trapped and ringed in the Isle of May. Presumably, this bird arrived at its breeding grounds somewhere in Continental Europe or Scandinavia, attempted breeding, succeed or failed, returned to its wintering grounds in Tropical and Southern Africa, and then returned to Europe in summer 2013 to breed again. And it was then, in July 2013, that this bird was re-trapped in a ringing session in Koksidje, Belgium.

Although according to the recovery report that we sent to both the ringers in the UK and Belgium says this bird travelled 661 km, obviously a few thousands kilometres more have been covered by this bird in reality!
Of the 5 recoveries of Icterine warblers in the BTO's ringing database, this is only the second found abroad, the other one having been found in France.



To find out more about the Isle of May please visit their web here.

Belgian Surprise

Orchards are great sources of food for our wintering birds, and also ringing opportunities for ringers. The North Notts Ringing Group was doing just this yesterday, ringing in an orchard. They were mist netting thrushes before the snow started to fall.

They managed to catch 450 birds, with a large proportion being Fieldfare (217 birds). There were also 177 Blackbirds, 15 Redwing and 3 Mistle Thrush caught, along with some other smaller passerines. Unfortunately there were no controls in this catch apart from one, a Blackcap wearing a Belgian ring!


In the last 3 years we have had eight reports of Blackcap being found in this country in January or Feburary. Discounting all of the birds that were ringed originally in the UK, one was from Germany, one from the Channel Islands, two from The Netherlands and four from Belgium. In the past, these Blackcaps might not have survived to migrate back to their country of origin, but due to the recent trend of relatively mild winters and increased garden feeding, these blackcaps are more likely to survive and return to their home country to breed. This increases the population that are 'programmed' to travel to the UK and Ireland for the winter. Hopefully, we will see more continental ringed blackcaps caught here during the winter months.

Thanks to Mark R Taylor for the photo and to Adrian Blackburn for letting us know.

Warbler wanderings

Ringing warblers in the summer is always exciting and the data collected is very valuable, especially when they are ringed as chicks or biometrics are taken.

The top warblers ringed in 2010 were Blackcap, Reed Warbler, Chiffchaff, Sedge Warbler and Willow Warbler, all with more than 30,000 birds ringed. These are a mix of long and short distance migrants. We have had reasonable number of Sedge Warbler recoveries from other countries so far (summaries below taken from the Online Ringing Reports). Also click here to see Sedge Warbler recovery totals per country.

Here in the Demography Team, we have just heard about Sedge Warbler T796371. This bird was ringed as a juvenile on 4th August at Hollesley, Suffolk (blue pin). It was then caught in The Netherlands on 13th August (awaiting ringing details, pink pin). Amazingly this bird was then caught on its southward migration on 18th August in Melsele, Oost-Vlaanderen, Belgium (green pin). Three countries in a couple of weeks, not bad by anyone's standard.

View Sedge Warbler tour in a larger map

Hopefully this bird will now head south to its wintering grounds and with increasing ringing in Africa, it is becoming more likely that we will be getting a clearer picture of their movements.

Thanks to Dawn Balmer for the photo.

A Dunnock from Norway... and other places, update

Having reported on 2 foreign ringed Dunnocks previously this autumn I thought that was our lot, especially considering we have only ever had 31 foreign ringed Dunnocks found in this country before.

Its turning out to be a bumper year for this species with new records of 1ER56285 from Sweden, caught by Ian Marshall at Flamborough Head, East Yorkshire and 10980683 from Belgium caught by Keith Bowden near Grantham, Lincolnshire.


The graph above shows just how many foreign Dunnocks have been processed up to this year and how good these recoveries really are.

Thank to Ian and Keith for letting us know about these birds.

'Red-beaked Starling' on the wrong side of the road

We received a phone call from a member of the public in March of this year concerning a little Starling that had sadly been hit by a car in Cirencester, Gloucestershire. It apparently looked ‘a bit odd’ as it had a red beak. Luckily this bird had a ring on its leg, 7T54587 and the words Bruxelles.

Finding a Starling from Belguim is very nice of course. To date, there have been 208 Belgium ringed Starlings found in the Britain & Ireland (see table below taken from the online ringing and recovery summaries):

However, we have just heard back from the Belgium Ringing Scheme and they have informed us that this was actually a Water Rail (now the red beak makes sense)! It was an adult ringed on 15th March 2009 at Bellem, Oost-Vlaanderen, which is a distance of 388km in 365 days. As you can see from the table below, there are far fewer recoveries of this species:

Out of interest we have now had a total of 5 Water Rail recovered as a result of collision with a car to date. The origins of the birds were UK, The Netherlands, Germany and two from Belgium.

Blue Tits on the move???...

We rarely hear of long-distance movements of Blue Tits, so it was quite exciting to hear last week of a Belgian-ringed bird in Norfolk. This was recaught by David Fuller at his site near Garboldisham. You'd imagine this would be juvenile dispersal, but we found out today that BLB-10945741 was ringed at Essen, northern Belgium, on 10 October 2008, almost a year previously!


View Blue Tits in a larger map

The map above shows all foreign movements of Blue Tits, with blue pins marking BTO-ringed birds found abroad and green pins marking foreign-ringed birds found here (the red pins show the movement of David's bird). It is interesting that of the 10 movements of BTO- ringed birds, seven were ringed in Kent and no less than four were ringed at Dungeness Bird Observatory! There have only been four foreign-ringed birds found here (all recaught), and one of these turned up at Dungeness as well!

So the Blue Tits in your garden might not be as uninteresting and resident as you might think.....