Ringing Course at Chew

I have just been on the Chew Valley Ringing Course in Somerset. This long standing course offered training in mist netting of various species covering Reed habitat, garden birds and also hirundines. Together with this information on moult stratagies and other catching methods were also given.

This year there were mainly trainee ringers attending the course and we had a good mix of birds caught and we were able to look at their plumage in great detail. This is a regular ringing site so there were plenty of known age birds. About 300 birds were caught during the 3 days including a bird that was ringed further north by West Wiltshire Ringing Group and also an adult Sedge Warbler that was already ringed by the French Ringing Scheme (Paris)! Ringing details are on there way.

Ringing Courses are an excellent way for ringers to get extra experience in various aspects of ringing and also be assessed for permit upgrades. These are particularly useful for ringers applying for training endorsements. Courses are currently full for this year and usually run from June to October but future courses will be on the BTO website next year. It is advisable to book early!

Thanks to all that participated on the course and to Ed Drewitt for the photos and Mike Bailey for the image of the Paris ring.

Roseate went to the Americas

Any report about Roseate Terns is always special, just like their rings. On Monday we opened the online recoveries from the weekend to find a sighting of a Roseate tern in a breeding colony. Yes, we are in the summer that’s what they should be… but we read a bit more and discovered that the finding county was New Hampshire! After double-checking, I checked the database and found that there is only one other recovery of a Roseate Tern ringed in the UK & Ireland and found across the Atlantic during the breeding season.

Quoting the Migration Atlas [about North West population of Roseate terns] ‘dispersal beyond this metapopulation to the Azores or USA appears to be extremely rare’, this confirms that this is a very unusual recovery.

Roseate terns breeding in the UK & Ireland winter along the east side of the Atlantic in Africa, while the birds from the North American populations go to Trinidad and the Brazilian coast. Some intrepid individuals clearly add variation to the genetic pool by moving between the continents!

SR73180 was ringed by the National Parks Wildlife Service (NPWS) as a chick on 1 July 2009 in Rockabill, near Dublin (Ireland) and hadn’t been seen until the 28 July 2011 when it was spotted at a breeding colony in The Isles of Shoals, a group of islands off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine.

SR73180 hasn't bred yet but, as a two year old Roseate tern, is doing a 'late season prospection' and, possibly finding a mate with whom to return next year and breed.

Daniel Hayward, who reported the bird and monitors all the seabirds in the Isles of Shoals as part of The Terns Project, has supplied the photographs.

Thanks to Daniel Hayward for letting us know and Stephen Newton from Birdwatch Ireland for his contribution to this post.

Quail

Earlier in the month we had reports from a few ringers saying that they had many male Quails ‘calling’ in their ringing sites, which coincides with the peak of birds shown by Birdtrack. These are thought to be young (3) males from more southern breeding grounds which are migrating north during their first calendar-year before their journey to their wintering grounds in the Sahel.

Quails are particularly difficult to monitor due to their fluctuating populations, skulking behaviour, long, complex migration, and mating system.

With only 3 Quails ringed during 2010 (out of a total of more than one million birds!) any recovery of a Quail qualifies for excitement, and that is exactly what happened when I found a report from Norway of a Quail found dead with a British ring.

This individual was found on the 24th May, and had been ringed just four days earlier in Sussex. Last May, Birdtrack records showed another peak in Quail numbers, probably involving birds on their way to breeding grounds.

The map below shows the only other 4 recoveries of Quails that have occurred in the last 100 years.

View Quails in a larger map

Blue: Adult female, ringed in 03 May 1965 in Cranleigh, Surrey, and shot in Zaragoza, Spain in September of the same year.

Green: Adult female, ringed in Fair Isle 23 May 1993 and reportedly killed by a Skua only a few days later in the same place.

Red: ringed as an adult female in Tielt, Belgium, the 10 May 2009 and killed by a Peregrine on 1st of July 2009 in Grantham.

Yellow: Adult male ringed in Elton, Derbyshire, and shot near Soria, Spain, on 18 Aug 2009.

One good tern deserves another... and another...

Tony Murray writes and provides photo:

The plight of the Roseate Tern has been well documented over the last few years. The National Parks Wildlife Service (NPWS) has been involved in wardening the largest ternery in Ireland at Lady’s Island Lake, Co. Wexford for many years now. Since my move from Co. Mayo to Co. Wexford in 2004, this site has fallen under my responsibility as the Wildlife Ranger for South Wexford.

The annual tern wardening project generally involves management of the site, predator control and monitoring. The deployment of nestboxes, ringing and ring reading has also been done at other Irish, UK and French Roseate Tern colonies.


The task has got bigger and bigger over the last few years as our numbers of gulls and terns have increased. Mediterranean Gulls are up to 10 pairs and it has also been good news for all our tern species. Roseates have climbed from 66 in 2004 to over 150 pairs this year. Through ring reading, it is great to show the growth is due to 'home grown' individuals, but however some have relocated here from Dublin.

Our Sandwich Tern numbers continue to grow as well, with 1100 to 1300 pairs between 2004 and 2006. We are now currently just shy of the two thousand mark! Ring reading has again shown plenty of 'home grown' birds breeding but a couple from Inner Farne, Farne Islands, Northumberland and Strangford, County Down have been recorded recently.

Interesting Reed Warbler distribution

During their free time, a few BTO staff have been working hard, finding all the Reed Warbler nests on a large site near Mundford, Norfolk. This work also involves Constant Effort ringing and monitoring.

This encouraged us to think of where Reed Warblers are caught and originate from. Below is a map of Reed Warblers which were ringed in Britain and then recaught/found in 2010. You can clearly see the southward migration route and also the lack of birds in Northern Scotland.

The map is interactive so you can zoom in and out for more or less detail.

View Reed Warbler distribution in a full screen map

So where do birds from other countries, that are recaptured/found in Britain in 2010 come from? See below.

View Reed Warbler originating distribution in a full screen map