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.

CES completed for another year

We have just had our last CES (Constant Effort Site) session of the season and are looking forward to seeing how this year compares to previous years.

Each year, on our last CES session we organise a 'CES breakfast', where members of the Nunnery Ringing Group and BTO staff who are not ringers get together and celebrate the completion of 12 visits. As an added incentive Susan and Paul Waghorn provide us with a fabulous breakfast after the nets have been taken down.

On this last CES session no less than 50% of the catch were Bullfinches (although this was actually 3 birds). Whitethroat, Reed Warbler and Wren were also caught and a September Swift was seen flying over one of the lakes.

Once all the data has been submitted from all of our CES projects from around the country we will be able to see if it has been a good breeding season or if this was a localised phenomenon (Rye Bay Ringing Group post).

Thanks to Susan Waghorn for the photo.

New species - Lime-billed Bullfinch!

Ringing always turns up something odd, and this Bullfinch is no exception. It was caught at Woolston Eyes, Cheshire, yesterday, and showed some very odd colouration indeed. One feather on the forehead, all of the nasal feathing and a couple of wing feathers were white, and the whole bird was generally quite pale in colour. Most striking though was the bill, which was mostly a pale lime colour instead of black! Very odd!


Thanks to Stephen Menzie for the info and photo of this oddity, and for comparison, a normal Bullfinch photo by Jill Pakenham is shown below.