From the land of ice and Blackcaps

For Hugh Insley, ringing at this time of year means, amongst many other things, trying to catch Siskins in his garden in Drummond, Inverness for his Retrapping Adults for Survival (RAS) project and so far this year he has caught 3,000. Inevitably, he also catches a few other birds which are not part of his RAS project.

On 11 July, he extracted a Blackcap from the net that was already wearing a ring. This wasn't one of the c. 50,000 that are ringed in Britain or Ireland every year though, but the first record of a Blackcap that was ringed in Iceland! Now the BTO has to add a new row to the long list of countries that Blackcaps have come from or have gone to with a connection to our ringing scheme.

Female Blackcap wearing an Icelandic ring. Photo by Hugh Insley.

As we have posted previously, Blackcaps have a very interesting and complex migration, possibly associated with climate change and supplementary feeding, which is currently being studied. Many of our British & Irish breeding birds are known to winter in the south, around Spain and Portugal, whilst those that now winter here are known to come from continental Europe - using a novel northwest migration rather than the typical southwest route to reach Iberia. 

The individual that Hugh caught was ringed on 3 November 2016 as a full grown adult female in the garden of the vicarage at Siglufjordur, N. Iceland (see the blue pin below). It was caught again twice more at the same location (on 20 January and 30 March 2017) before heading south to Inverness.

Blackcaps are a vagrant species in Iceland and only 222 have been ringed there; only five of these have been caught again in the country. Additionally, eight Blackcaps that were ringed abroad (five from Belgium and one each from Denmark, The Netherlands and France) have been caught in Iceland. 

 

So, was this a 'British bird' making a novel northwest instead of southwesterly (mirror-image migration) before returning to breed, or was it part of a wider northward movement now undertaken by central European Blackcaps into northern Europe?  

Pink-foot pie anyone?

Eating out in London can be a rich and varied experience, but it's perhaps not everyday that when enjoying your meal you find a bird ring! Now there are many apocryphal tales of rings found in pies in the history of the ringing scheme, but we've always struggled to actually find these in the archives. So when we heard of a case recently we were more than interested.

This particular story has a long history though, with the afore-mentioned pie being eaten sometime in 1955 or 1956. The ring was then passed to a young schoolboy who was interested in birds and it lay as a curiosity in a drawer until being unearthed just recently. That young schoolboy was Mike Archer, a long-standing ringer and trainer, and he took the opportunity at the recent BTO Conference to mention this ring to Gudmundur Gudmundsson, the head of the Icelandic Ringing Scheme, who was speaking at the conference. So over breakfast the recovery was reported and on his return to Iceland the ringing details soon surfaced.

ISR 12250 was in fact a Pink-footed Goose ringed as a moulting bird in July 1953 by none other than Sir Peter Scott (or Mr Peter Scott as he was then); another fascinating twist to the tale. It had presumably been shot in winter in the UK and somehow made its way to a London restaurant, where its preparation left something to be desired!

Some Pink-footed Geese not yet in pies (Tommy Holden)

By chance, sharing that same conference breakfast table was Chris du Feu, who has been working with the Icelandic Ringing Scheme in converting their recovery coding to a standard EURING format. Their system has always been to give a new code to each new finding circumstance and to date there have been 525 ways of recovering birds in Iceland. But this was their first ever record of a ring found in a pie, so became circumstance #526.

A truly international recovery

We recently received a rather unusual recovery report in the office. A French visitor to Iceland found ring GN92442 on a footpath in western Iceland over the summer and duly reported it online via www.ring.ac

Nothing too odd about this I hear you sigh, but on processing the recovery we found that this ring actually belonged to a young Tawny Owl, ringed in the nest in Lothian, eastern Scotland, in June 2006! This is not a typical movement for a Tawny Owl, with no overseas recoveries in the 100-year history of the Scheme (see a summary here), so a bit of further investigation was required...

It then transpired that this bird had sadly died before fledging the nest and on finding the dead chick, the ringer involved had removed the ring and kept it on their binoculars strap. Our initial suspicions were proved correct when the ringer mentioned that they'd also made a recent trip to Iceland! When the strap on their binoculars broke, they were nearly lost down a cliff (and almost themselves trying to retrieve them), but hadn't noticed that the ring had been lost. So the ring went from Scottish bird, to Icelandic clifftop to French living room - a truly international recovery!


View GN92442 in a larger map

The Godwit Club

The amazing International Schools Godwit Project links children and birds from Iceland, Ireland and the UK. Children from all three countries are learning about bird migration and ecology and at the same time they are helping scientists in their study of the species. Many Black-tailed Godwits are being colour marked in their breeding grounds -Iceland- so their movements and home ranges can be traced by birdwatchers and scientists!
The Topsham Primary School Godwit Club has been meeting weekly after school to study the amazing migration patterns of the Icelandic Black-tailed Godwits. Last week they met up with David Lindo and a BBC filming crew and went searching for wintering coloured marked Godwits, and it seems that they had a lot of fun too!
If you want to know more about this great project don't miss this week's BBC's Countryfile, on Sunday 12th December 2010, or visit the schools' update by clicking here.
Reporting colour ringed birds is very important as it helps in the understanding of their ecology, which can be used in the future for their conservation. So please, next time you spot a colour ringed bird make sure that you make a note and contact us here.

Colourful Black-wits tracked

Colour ringing projects provide a brilliant opportunity to be able to identify ringed birds in the field. The Black-tailed Godwit is a great example, with lots of chicks being colour ringed in their breeding ground in Iceland, providing a lot of information of their movements as part of this project coordinated by Pete Potts.


One of these Godwits, 568692 (the bird on the left), was ringed in Langus, Siglufjurdor in northern Iceland and it has been seen several times in the UK over 2 years. Remember that during the summer this bird probably went all the way back to Iceland to breed, clocking up the miles.


View Black tailed Godwit in a larger map

Thanks to Astrid Kant and David Wileman for the information and the photos.

BTO Slav Grebe in Iceland

Just a quick post today, of a really nice recovery, if not current... We recently received news though of a Slavonian Grebe found dead in a fishing net in Iceland, and this is in fact only our third foreign movement.

FB12777 was ringed at a site near Inverness in October 2004 and found in June 2008 on Mývatn in central Iceland. This movement is quite the opposite of one other BTO bird which was also ringed near Inverness (in August 1983) and found dead in Italy in June 1984! The finding locations are shown in blue below.


View Slavonian Grebes in a larger map

The only movement 'the other way' is a bird ringed in Russia in July 1962 (on the wonderfully-named Lake Molotovskoye) and found oiled at Hinderwell, North Yorkshire in April 1963. It was cleabned and succesfully released (shown in red above).