The twelve recoveries for Christmas

Partridge in a Pear Tree
There is no mention of a Pear tree on the BTO BirdFacts pages for Grey Partridge however we do have 127 recoveries for this species. Most of these recoveries are of shot birds, as you would expect, but we do have several that have been radio tagged and the mortalities reported. One of the predators of these is quite surprising. Click here to open this recovery

Two Turtle Doves
We have even fewer recoveries for Turtle Dove (101) on the system, due to a severe decline in numbers since the late-1970s. As a result, they are still on the 'Red List' of 'Birds of Conservation Concern'. These reports are mainly of birds found dead, shot or found after being killed by a predator but it is pleasing to see that 73 of these reports are from ringers re-catching ringed birds; helping to further understand their decline and movements.


Recoveries Of Turtle Dove for Britain & Ireland

You'd have to have good eyes to get this recovery. Click here to open this recovery

Three French Hens
Even though our Ringing Scheme doesn't ring chickens, it does ring the majestic Hen Harrier. There has been some great work in recent years on wing tagging Hen Harriers, increasing the life histories of these birds from their breeding quarters to their wintering areas. One bird getting an amazing 87 sightings compressed into just two years.

For our selected recovery, it has to be a French one though. Click here to open this recovery.

Four Calling Birds
At this time of year the Tawny Owl is starting to think about the up and coming breeding season and on those frosty nights, can be heard calling to each other. One recovery that you haven't seen the report for was a Tawny Owl ring found in Iceland! This caused some confusion here in the Ringing Team, as we have never had a foreign recovery of Tawny Owl. After much investigation we found out that this ring was put on a Tawny Owl chick, which died in the nest. This ring was collected (to avoid subsequent reporting) and put on the ringer's binoculars. After a binocular strap broke on a birding trip to Iceland, this ring was later found and reported to our Ringing Scheme.

Our chosen recovery however is different and is an unusual way to go. Click here to open this recovery.

Tawny Owl. Photograph taken by Lee Barber

Five Gold Rings
One of the highlights for 2015 were the numbers of Goldcrest caught. We posted previously just how good the Goldrush was.

The chosen recovery has links with the three French Hens. Click here to open this recovery to understand how.

Six Geese a-Laying
How can we not look at goose nest records after a title like this!? For 2015, the BTO Nest Record Scheme has received 108 Canada Goose, 49 Greylag Goose and seven Egyptian Goose nest records. This has remained stable but very low over the years. If you have any records please let the Nest Record Scheme know.

An amazing recovery from the Wildfowl & Wetland Trust. Click here to open this recovery.

Seven Swans a-Swimming
One of our highest reported groups of birds are swans. Being large, white and living in populated places they are easily found and reported. Many land on roads thinking they are rivers and being less maneuverable they do crash into wires, walls and bridges.


One of our Thetford, Norfolk colour ringed Mute Swans this morning, showing just how easy it is to get colour ring sightings. Photograph taken by Lee Barber

The Bewick's Swan is famous for it's migration route but this recovery points out they do live a long time. Click here to open this recovery of 28 years!

Eight Maids a-Milking
We were not able to find any maids in the BTO ringing database but there are quite a few cows mentioned. Unfortunately, it seems like they are not too keen on swans which can get trampled. We have a very different recovery involving a Sparrowhawk for our chosen recovery. Click here to open this recovery.

Nine Ladies Dancing
The Great Crested Grebe is famous for it's pair bonding display, where it rises out of the water and dances on the surface. Few grebes are ringed and even fewer are found later, giving a grand total of eight records to choose from. How the finder got this recovery is unknown but it probably took hours. Click here for the recovery.

Great Crested Grebe. Photograph taken by Chris Knights

Ten Lords a-Leaping
This may be a tenuous link but in the movie, 'Lord of the Rings', Gandalf leaps off Saruman's tower onto a Great Eagle. This looks remarkably like a Golden Eagle and we have 35 recoveries of this species. Click here to open this recovery.

Eleven Pipers Piping
Not 11 records of a Purple Sandpiper, but just one. This is the number of records we have of dead Purple Sandpipers. By re-catching 'purps' our valued ringers have increased the information on this species by 928 records. These include the data from a colour-ringing project in Norway which has produced an amazing 51 sightings in Britain & Ireland. Click here to open this recovery.

Twelve Drummers Drumming
The Snipe is famous for its drumming breeding display and we have received quite a few recoveries of this species over the years from 24 other countries. One of these was from one of our Constant Effort Sites (CES). Only one Snipe has been ringed at Cranwich CES to date and so far there is a 100% recovery rate for this species. Click here to open this recovery.



Measuring a Snipe. Photograph taken by Lee Barber

The Demography Team wishes you all a very Merry Christmas and happy New Year

One Tern Turns the Tabloids

Continuing the seabird theme of last week, today's post is about Lesser Crested Terns (Thalasseus bengalensis).

Lesser Crested Terns are widespread. They breed in subtropical coasts in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and in the Western Pacific in Australia. Outside the breeding period they range roughly in the same areas.

We occasionally receive reports of these birds, as shown on the map below, mainly from West India, Sri Lanka and one from Sumatra. Not too surprising as all these reports are located within the normal distribution range for this species. 

You may be surprised to learn that BTO rings have been used for a species of bird that normally doesn't occur in Britain & Ireland. But this is not the first time we have written about ringing abroad with BTO rings. Our ringers use our rings abroad in countries where there is not an established bird ringing scheme. One of such countries is Bahrain, a small island country in the Persian Gulf, where some of our ringers monitor breeding terns, including Lesser Crested Terns. Other BTO ringers ringing abroad work in Gambia, South Georgia, Falkland Islands and the Seychelles.

The map below shows where the Lesser Crested Terns ringed in the Bahrain have been recovered and reported. The yellow pin is the ringing site in Bahrain and the red pins are the places where they have been found.

What prompted sharing this story was the media craze that one bird generated in Sri Lanka last week because it was wearing a BTO ring. We received multiple reports from different people, including the finder, a wildlife ranger, an environmental journalist and someone who read the story on the paper. Hopefully as more people are aware of bird ringing, this will increase the reporting of birds and aid their conservation.

To our knowledge, the finding of this bird was on the Sri Lankan News website: Ceylon Today (below). Hiru News had an interesting headline and it featured in a nice article in the Sunday Times (from Sri Lanka).

From Ceylon Today (LITE) on the 29/11/2015



Headline from the Hiru News



Image from Rodrigo Malaka's comprehensive article in the Sunday Times

Choppy times for Manxies

Manx Shearwaters and their migration provide one of the most fascinating bird stories of the British Isles. They breed in inaccessible places and historically have been difficult to observe, let alone study, outside their breeding period. For this reason, the Manx Shearwater has been a mysterious species for ornithologists for many years. Luckily, technology, the Ringing Scheme and the fact that it is a long lived species have combined to provide us with a lot of information on the life history of the Manx Shearwater, including its distribution and behaviour in summer and winter.

The 300,000 breeding pairs of Manx Shearwaters in Britain & Ireland are distributed among about 50 colonies, the largest ones being Skomer in Wales and Rum in Scotland. Several thousand 'Manxies' are ringed by BTO ringers every year; the table below show the last five years from the Online Ringing and Nest Recording Report.

Most 'regular' recoveries of Manx Shearwaters are generated at their breeding sites, when they return to breed at the same colonies year after year. Since the BTO Ringing Scheme started, over 100 years ago, we have received about 1,000 reports of BTO-ringed birds from foreign countries, all except one on the Atlantic coast, most of them in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. 

Nowadays, the more exciting and revealings facts about the pelagic life of this species come not from ringing but from satellite and datalogger tracking. When the birds return to breed in their burrows on islands in Britain & Ireland, they can be fitted with special devices that are safe for the birds and give more detailed information about their movements and behaviour.

Researchers studying this species have been able to reveal where most 'Manxies' spend their winters and what routes they take to and from the breeding colonies. One such research project is led by T Guilford - some result from which, below, show the estimated routes and stopovers of 12 birds fitted with geolocators. 

Different colours indicate different birds, the 'lines' are joined dots and do not represent actual trajectories of the birds. 

Migration and stopover in a small pelagic seabird, the Manx shearwater Puffinus puffinus: insights from machine learning
T Guilford, J Meade, J Willis, R.A Phillips, D Boyle, S Roberts, M Collett, RFreeman, C.M PerrinsProc. R. Soc. B 2009 276 1215-1223; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.1577. Published 24 February 2009

Most of the South American reports occur between November and January, and the number of dead birds reported along the coasts of the Atlantic varies from year to year. So far this Autumn we have received 10 reports, a few more than we would expect. Many of the finders who kindly let us know about these Manx Shearwaters mentioned the stormy weather they have experienced on the other side of the Atlantic. These intense stormy periods may be linked to a strong 'El Niño' event in the Pacific, bringing unusual weather to many parts of the world including North and South America. 'El Niño' literally translates as 'the child', because this weather anomaly typically manifests around Christmas time when the birth of baby Jesus (the child) is celebrated. The graph below puts the 2015 'El Niño' event in context compared to previous strong 'El Niño' events.

The graph above shows how this year's event ranks in terms of severity compared to other strong 'El Niño' events. More information can be found at: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/tbw/?n=tampabayelninopage

It is also interesting to see how many birds have been reported washed up on the shores of the east Atlantic in the last two decades. 

In North America, Deaborah Kotzebue, who lives Texas, USA, found a Manx Shearwater in Gulf Shores, Alabama, washed up after a stormy period. She sent us some photographs to illustrate what the place is like. 

The other nine reports of Manx Shearwaters were of birds washed up on beaches in Brazil, South America. One of them was found on Campeche beach, Santa Catarina, by surfer Paulo Vieira. I asked Paulo if the weather had been particularly stormy and he replied "Yes, it has been very stormy  down here in Santa Catarina State, and southen Brazil in general. We are suffering the effects of 'El Niño', which produces a lot of rain during the Spring (above normal range). Since mid-September until early-November it has been raining a lot down here".

At the end of the wintering period we will give an update on Manx Shearwaters on the other side of the pond.

The Manx Shearwater was chosen as the bird of the month in September 2015. See the distribution map in the Atlas Mapstore.

Out of Africa... and into Norfolk, for a 13 gram bird

Oliver Fox writes:

Monitoring of wintering passerines is one of the main objectives of the Kartong Bird Observatory (KBO), a project run by volunteer ringers in the south of The Gambia, West Africa. Situated on the Atlantic coast close to the Senegalese border, the Kartong wetlands were formed relatively recently as a result of wet-season flooding of disused sand mines and form part of the Allahein to Kartong coast IBA.


Palearctic passerines being processed at Kartong Bird Observatory taken by Colin cross



The wetland reedbeds and surrounding scrub provides an excellent wintering site for many Palearctic passerines, and mist-net surveys have highlighted the importance of the site for Western Olivaceous Warblers, Common Whitethroats, Subalpine Warblers and Common Nightingales in particular. In dry years the area provides refuge for Sahel-dependent species, such as Western Orphean Warblers and Woodchat Shrikes, when conditions further north become unfavourable. Located on a promontory extending into the Atlantic, the site is also well placed to observe passage migration of Blackcaps and Garden Warblers moving south in October and November and Willow Warblers moving north in early Spring.

Wintering Reed Warblers are regularly encountered at Kartong, both in the Typhus reedbeds and the dry coastal and Acacia scrub that surrounds the wetlands. A proportion of those ringed at Kartong seem to be faithful to the wintering site, with five birds recaptured the winter after ringing and one bird returning to Kartong in two successive winters.

Reed Warbler about to be released at Kartong taken by Oliver Fox

News from the BTO has been received that a Reed Warbler ringed on 18/01/14 at Kartong was recaught at Hilgay Wetland Creation, Norfolk on 11/08/2015 BTO's Graham Austin, only 29 km from BTO HQ. There were several BTO staff members on the expedition in 2014, so it seems fitting that the bird was caught in Norfolk a few months later.

This is the sixth Reed Warbler ringed at KBO to be recaptured back in Europe during the summer months, with three having been previously recaptured in Spain, one on Guernsey and one in Surrey. Similarly, the ringing teams at Kartong have recaptured two Spanish and one British & Irish-ringed bird in the last few years, showing the migration pattern of Reed Warblers from Western Europe to the coast of West Africa.

Details of this latest recovery can be found on the Recoveries and Controls page of the KBO website.

The Goldrush: update

After the big influx that we reported previously on the Demog Blog, and on our very own BTO Bird Migration Blog, things have calmed down somewhat after the initial rush (see BirdTrack chart below). For our ringers however, it's time to start inputting all that data scrupulously collected including age, sex, date, time, location, wing length, weight and fat and muscle scores. 


Goldcrest reporting rate by BirdTrack


Once the BTO receives the data, they will be loaded and the ringer/finder should receive the details about these birds within a few days (as long as the original ringer has submitted the ringing data). If it's a foreign-ringed Goldcrest, the BTO will contact these schemes and exchange information. Just this morning we received a file from Daphne Watson from the Isle of Wight who caught a Belgian ringed Goldcrest and the details arrived with the Belgian Ringing Scheme only 3 hours later (isn't technology brilliant!). They send us the ringing details and we then pass the information onto Daphne.

Unusually pale Goldcrest lacking it's dark pigments taken by Euan Ferguson and Carmen Azahara

Pale Goldcrest compared to a more usual one, taken by Euan Ferguson and Carmen Azahara

Below is a map of the origins of all the Goldcrests ringed abroad that have been caught in Britain & Ireland within the last couple of weeks! There are bound to be a few more and they will arrive in due course, ready for the Online ringing report to be published next year.

Some of the origins of these Goldcrests are very notable, as we have only received a handful of reports from these locations in the last 106 years (it also takes a lot of Goldcrests to get a handful). For example this was the 15th Belgium-ringed, the eighth Polish-ringed and sixth Lithuanian-ringed Goldcrests reported here. Click on the red point to find out how many reports of Goldcrests there have been from each county.