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.

Petrel in Peril

Storm Petrels are amazing little birds. Rarely seen on land during the day and spending the night in their burrows. For a bird which is similar in size to a Greenfinch this bird can make some impressive movements. One such Storm Petrel was ringed in Ona, Norway and controlled by another ringer three days later on the Isle of May (902km)! (Blue pins on map).


Little is known about the winter movements out at sea but they usually leave UK waters in September or October and by November they are around the West African coast. They then head further south to moult near South Africa before making the reverse journey, to get to their breeding grounds in April. We have relatively few recoveries showing this movement as if they die this is likely to be out at sea but 28 have been reported in South Africa so far.


View Storm petrel in a larger map

Finding a Storm Petrel inland is not very likely but one was found on 17 Jan at Shimuwini Bush Camp, Kruger National Park, South Africa! The reason for this was probably a tropical cyclone blowing this bird off course. Luckily this bird was ringed and from the ring number we were able to tell them that this bird had been ringed 172 days earlier on Mousa, Shetland (9,776km, although it was probably more like 13,000km considering it had to fly round West Africa). (Red pins).

Thanks to Mike Pennington for letting us know and Stuart Newson for the photo.