Eat like a Gannet

Along with all of the useful data coming into the Demography Team from the Nest Record and Ringing schemes, we also get some interesting or unusual reports. Our latest recovery from Dr Kees Camphuysen, Senior Scientist and Marine Ornithologist at the Nederlands Instituut voor Zeeonderzoek, is one of these:

"I was demonstrating a post mortem for Ecomare animal care staff tonight on an unringed juvenile female Gannet. It was originally found fresh dead on a beach on Texel, The Netherlands, in 2013 but was frozen to keep it in a fresh state until the post mortem."

Juvenile Gannet during post mortem - Dr Kees Camphuysen

"It was severely emaciated but this was not unusual of young Gannets at this time of year but I could feel a very lean and stiff "fish" in the stomach. It was not a fish however. It was a wing...a bird wing, heavily digested and the primary shafts suggested the bird was reasonably large. To my utter surprise, in the muddy blackish, digested remains was....a ring!!!"

The ring was put on a Fulmar chick on 4 August 2013 on Swona, Orkney by the Orkney Ringing Group. Considering this bird was found on 18 October 2013, this chick didn't survive very long. Kees and his colleagues believe the chick may have been eaten by a large fish, possibly a Cod, which was then caught by fishermen, gutted and the offal (including the remains of the Fulmar!) eaten by the Gannet. We will never know for sure what happened but it is very interesting nevertheless.

The contents of the Gannet including blackened feathers and ring - Dr Kees Camphuysen

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.

There's more at Whitby than the seaside... update

We have just received news about the foreign ringed Pallas's Warbler that we reported a couple of days ago, which was caught by Wilf Norman near Whitby Lighthouse, North Yorkshire on 31 October 2010.


View Pallas's Warbler in a larger map

This bird was ringed on 27 Oct 2010 at 11am, only a few days before it was recaptured! It was originally caught at Nijefurd, Warns, Friesland, Netherlands (52°52’54 N, 05°24’20 E). It is also interesting to note the northward movement into this country. Reverse migration?

Thanks to our colleagues in The Netherlands and to Wilf Norman.

Honey Buzzards and trains don't mix

Unfortunately some of the really interesting stories get delayed, as they are checked and double-checked. This was the case with NLA 6124986.


This was a Buzzard found dead on railway lines near Ipswich, Suffolk, in August 2008. This was carrying a Dutch ring, which was pretty unusual, but even more so when we got the report back recently, as it had been ringed in the nest as a Honey Buzzard! Ringed in July 2006 in the Drenthe region of The Netherlands, this is only the third foreign-ringed Honey Buzzard to be found in the UK. The others were ringed in Germany (injured hitting wires in Kent in July 1973) and Sweden (killed hitting wires in South Yorkshire in October 1976).

Our own birds do move around a fair bit as well. A pair seen in south Wales in 2006 were both colour-ringed: the female was from Shropshire (ringed in 2000) and the male was from central Wales (ringed in 2002). Welsh birds have actually wandered quite widely, being found injured in Hampshire, stuck in a wire fence in France and shot to protect chickens and ducks in Ghana.

The only other foreign movements we know of are a bird from Scotland, shot in Guinea in February 1991, and a bird from Sussex, hit by a train in France in August 2007. Maybe Honey Buzzards and trains just don't mix! These are shown on the map, but we've kept off any possibly sensitive breeding sites, as birds do still suffer persecution.

View Honey Buzzards in a larger map