Old'un Goldie

Last night parental duties prevented me from making the utmost of some absolutely perfect lamping conditions but I did manage to sneak out to a site just down the road for an hour or two!

The catch was small, one new and two re-trap Woodcock but I did also catch a ringed Golden Plover. At first glance in the beam it looked VERY interesting as the ring was clearly aluminium and there were no colour-rings. A foreigner?? Luckily it sat tight otherwise I'd have been cursing for weeks! Whilst not as interesting as I'd hoped it did prove to be our oldest recorded Golden Plover to-date. I had ringed it originally with an old D ring back on 14th November 2009 at the exact same location to within 50m!

Now sporting colour rings! Hopefully our paths might cross again in another 6 years when it will be the oldest Golden Plover recorded under the BTO ringing scheme!

When originally caught this bird was aged as an adult i.e. at least a year and a half old so although officially only 6 years, 3 months and 18 days have elapsed it is at least 7 years and 9 months old. The current longevity record for a British-ringed Golden Plover stands at 12 years and 29 days so still a way to go yet! Waders as a group are generally long-lived and compared to some other species of comparable size this figure is fairly low. The current record for Oystercatcher stands at 40 years, 1 month and 2 days, for Grey Plover it is 25 years, 1 month and 18 days, for Lapwing 21 years 1 month and 15 days and for Knot 27 years, 3 months and 29 days. Even Dunlin stands at 19 years 3 months and 26 days! Given all the problems they face with habitat destruction, climate change and illegal hunting etc I am constantly in awe that such small creatures can stay out of trouble for so long! 

This link to the BTO's longevity pages may be of interest and may provide a few surprises!

http://app.bto.org/ring/countyrec/results2014/longevity.htm

I suppose with such big eyes it isn't that difficult to watch out for yourself!

AA was worth the money after all!

On 8th August 2013 our Sandwich Tern colour-ringing project started at Ynyslas with the ceremonial marking of Red KAA, an adult caught on autumn passage from breeding grounds as yet unknown.

Well, who would have thought, yesterday I had email confirmation from South African tern ringer extraordinaire Mark Boorman that he had just recorded it alive and well hanging out at 4 Mile Salt Works, Swakopmund, Namibia with a whole host of other Sandwich Terns, many of which have been colour-ringed by ornithologists from all over Europe! So far 4 of the birds ringed at Ynyslas have been seen at this one location - about 1 in 10 of all the birds we have marked so far. 

Thanks for all your efforts Mark, very good to know what is going on in our birds "other lives". The following is a link to a short paper by Mark on the tern ringing at 4 Mile salt works and the dangers the terns face from predatory Jackals and Hyaenas http://safring.adu.org.za/papers/afring_38_24.pdf. Puts the dog-walking debacle at Ynyslas into sharp context!!

Totally Turnstoned!

Last night, finally, the winds dropped and with it being a high tide and a newish moon conditions were perfect for Jane, Jacques and I to attempt a wader catch at a site just south of Aberystwyth. The recent high seas and strong winds have seen the sea breach the cobble sea-defences and flood the adjacent grass pastures. This is a regular winter event despite the unfortunate farmer's best attempts to prevent it. Whilst it may not be good news for the farmer it is great news for us because it means that all the waders get to use the pools as a nocturnal high-tide roost and we get a great opportunity to mist-net and ring a few.

Four wader nets were set over the pools with the greatest amount of droppings and we retreated back to the car to await nightfall. Just after dark we heard the sound of approaching Oystercatchers and Curlews and soon the nets were catching to great effect.  By the end of the evening we had caught 77 birds including our highest ever catch of 36 Turnstones (27 new birds and 9 retraps/controls). 

One of the 36 Turnstones caught which included retraps of 6 birds ringed 

locally in 2013, one from 2015 and 2 controls from elsewhere.

We also caught 24 Oystercatchers, 8 Redshank, 7 Curlew, 1 Black-headed Gull and this smart drake Teal.

The main targets for the night though were Curlews as I had just taken delivery of some colour-rings we could use at that site from Paddy Jenks of the Pembrokeshire Ringing Group. We had already caught a dozen or so Curlews there earlier this winter but had only fitted theses with BTO metal rings. 

Curlew A1, the first Curlew to be colour-ringed at this site. 

Keep your eyes peeled for this top notch bird!

The colour-rings are far more effective in generating recoveries and resightings thereby giving much more data/bird for conservation efforts on this seriously declining species. 

It was a very successful catch for this site given the fairly low number of waders using the local area and hopefully we will get chance to have another go at catching a few more Curlews there before they all disperse to their breeding grounds in March. Please keep your eyes peeled for Curlews with colour-rings and either report them directly to me or via the BTO website.

804.... unlucky for some??

If you are a Woodcock, it would appear so!!

We had news this week of a recovered Woodcock and quite excitingly for me, it was one I had ringed. It was actually only my fourth ever self ringed Woodcock, back in November 2014 on farmland near my house, ring number EY80804. Shot dead in Nielles les Blequin, Pas de Calais, France, on 22 Nov 2015, almost a year to the day it was ringed.

This was uncannily similar to a recovery Rich Dobbins blogged about for the Teifi Ringing Group just before Christmas http://teifimarshbirds.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/woodcock-in-haute-saone-france.html concerning Woodcock EY33804 shot in Haute-Saone, France on 20 Dec 2015! So, it would appear that 804 isn't so lucky if you are a Woodcock, but slightly luckier if you are a ringer! 

It has also helped provide a bit more of a clue as to where some of our Woodcock ended up rather than returning back to not so sunny Wales! As suggested by Rich, the mild wet weather may have caused a bit of a diversion? 

Hopefully the colder spell will see a bit more movement our way in the next few weeks....

Mid-Wales Ringing Group

The BTO has just formally approved the formation of the Mid-Wales Ringing Group so from 1st January 2016 this blog will feature the activities and achievements of this group. In essence there there will be little practical change although we will eventually be inviting supporting (non-ringing) members for a small annual contribution to the ever increasing costs - please form an orderly queue! 

A ton of gold...

Last night, Silvia and I headed out for our last lamping session of 2015. The weather was by no means perfect for catching, but the moon wasn't up until 22:00 so it was pretty dark. Although all of the rain meant that the fields were great for waders to feed on them, it also meant that creeping up on them was very difficult. Unfortunately the Snipe could here me from a long way away, and as a result I didn't catch any. Thankfully there were a few 'dry' patches where being quiet wasn't as tricky. On one of these patches I spotted a single Golden Plover. Somehow I managed to creep up to it and catch it. Amazingly this is the 100th new Golden Plover I've caught this winter! Although it's been a very mild winter, numbers of Golden Plover on our ringing sites have now dropped to single figures. Early on in the season there were 100+ in some fields, this drop in numbers has also been reflected in the number of birds caught - 3 in September, 48 in October, 35 in November and just 14 in December. Hopefully some of the birds will get re-sighted so we can learn more about their winter dispersal.

Two other milestones were also reached last night when I caught mine and Silvia's 100th Fieldfare of the winter. and in doing so also brought up our 500th 'dazzled' bird of the winter. Hopefully January to early April can also bring us some more good catches.

Roll on 2016!!

Dippers rising!

Just before Christmas, battling the after-effects of my first dose of man-flu for over two-years,  I plunged into the flooded waters of the Rivers Wye and Irfon in order to check a few more roost-sites of Dippers (not a wise move on your own really as I ended up soaked to the skin and almost got swept away!).

Earlier this year we ringed 535 nestling Dippers, an all time high, and checking all known roost sites in the autumn/winter is a great way of finding out how well these birds have survived and where they have subsequently settled following their post-juvenile dispersal. It also allows us to colour-ring the survivors as we don't colour-ring chicks in the nest due to the naturally low survival rate. 

Spray-covered Dipper roosting on a rock-face near a waterfall. Nearby (and impossible to photograph unfortunately) was a bird roosting behind a raging torrent!

So far this season we have checked 257 roost sites and recorded 342 roosting Dippers of which 301 have been caught or identified from colour-rings. Well over 50% of all birds caught were retraps or controls. Dippers are pretty sedentary but females especially will swop river catchments. The furthest movement recorded so far this year is of a nestling that I ringed on the River Rea near Neen Savage in Shropshire and then re-rapped on the upper reaches of the River Teme, a straight-line distance of over 53 km. 

The Dipper equivalent of a Sandwich Tern in Namibia!

Roost counts at occupied roosts were  as follows:-

1 x 12

2 x 9

2 x 7

4 x 6

5 x 5

15 x 4

22 x 3

34 x 2

55 x 1

The remaining 117 suitable or previously used roost sites had no birds present. We still have about 50 odd known sites to check if/when the waters subside.

It is clear from this monitoring that the Dipper population locally is continuing to recover from a population dip in the  1990's almost certainly caused by the use of new powerful Synthetic Pyrethroid (Cypermethrin) sheep-dips (withdrawn from sale in the UK in 2010) and undoubtedly helped by the provision of well over 100 purpose-built nest-boxes.)

An amazing Christmas Sandwich!

What's the best present you can give a bird-ringer for Christmas? Well you could do a lot worse than a Christmas Sandwich! 

A few years ago we started colour-ringing Sandwich Terns at Ynyslas National Nature Reserve in order to study the annual autumn passage of these amazing birds through the site. In 2013 we caught 83 different Sandwich Terns but were only using BTO metal rings at the time. Few recoveries of these birds have been received so far but as Sandwich Terns are long-lived some may yet arrive. Following our success in 2012 we registered a colour-ringing scheme in 2013. As is often the way, the autumn passage was considerably smaller in 2013 and 2014, with unfavourable weather conditions at crucial times, and we only managed to ring 11 birds in 2013 and just 2 in 2014. In 2015, after another unpromising start, things improved and we colour-ringed 43 birds, including 4 retraps/controls of birds ringed in earlier years/elsewhere. We have already had a number of sightings of these birds in Southern England on their onward journey and some from breeding colonies in the North-East of England. 

Late on Christmas Eve I received an email forwarded by Ewan Weston, who co-ordinates sightings of colour-ringed Sandwich Terns in the UK, from Mark Boorman who had recently read the ring of one of these terns at Walvis Bay Oyster Beds in Namibia!! Certainly brightened a wet winter evening and absolutely amazing to know exactly where one of these birds is spending their winter, amongst the Pelicans and Flamingos on the Skeleton Coast on the edge of the Namib desert - it's certainly no turkey!

Christmas wrapping

At a time of year when people marvel at the beauty of the Barn Owl, because they inevitably will have a Christmas card with one on, I have been busy wrapping my latest Christmas box.

Lee Walker, from the Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme contacted me last year asking for any dead Barn Owls to be forwarded on to him, regardless of how they were killed. They send out the freepost boxes, I usually have one at home so that I can send it off quickly before the birds start decomposing. They aim to quantify any levels of contaminants in the liver and eggs of selected species, to determine how and why they vary between species and regions, how they change over time and the effects they have on individual birds and their populations.

This is the 3rd Barn Owl I have had from this general location in as many months, no wonder that is our worst performing area!

Posted on behalf of Chris Griffiths, Montgomeryshire Barn Owl Group

A pair of Shorties (or what exactly do Short-eared Owls eat?)

The past couple of nights have seen a bit of very successful lamping, both inland and on the coast. On Friday Jacques and I headed up to the Ceri Ridgeway to try and ring a few more Golden Plover. Halfway across the first field I spot a double eye-shine in the beam (this is unusual as with waders you almost always get just one). Initially I thought it might have been a polecat but as I got closer I could make out the unmistakable shape of a Short-eared Owl. Now walking a bit more carefully,  I edged forward until I was close enough to drop the net on it. Only then could I see that, even whilst under the net, it was still holding on tightly to a decapitated Fieldfare it had partially plucked and eaten. Jacques seemed pretty pleased and got to ring his 101 species as a trainee, which isn't bad going in just over 7 months!!. The rest of the fields yielded 5 Woodcock, 7 Golden Plover, 2 Fieldfares (with heads) and a Snipe. We also watched the same or another Shorty in hot pursuit of a Golden Plover that had just flushed in the beam!

This bird was aged as a first-year female based on tail pattern and the

 buff background colour and barring on the outer secondaries. 

The following evening Jane joined us and we headed down to Ynyslas to see what waders we could catch on the high tide. There were a good number of Redshank present and we quickly caught 23 (and could have easily caught another 10) before realising that I only had 22 'D2' rings on me! Was a bit traumatised to have to release one without a ring!

Having run out of rings for Redshank we decide to have a quick walk around the fields for Woodcock, Snipe and Jack Snipe. Halfway around the usual beat, having failed to get anywhere near any of the 20+ Snipe flushed, I get a double eyeshine in the beam again. As I get closer I can see it is another Short-eared Owl! Only one problem, there's a great big pool of water between me and it. Go round or keep it in the beam and go straight across? I opt for the latter and walk as quietly as I can through the middle of the pool. Thankfully, the owl sits tight and is soon under the net and I can then see why it was reluctant to fly off - it was sitting on the half-eaten remains of a freshly killed Lapwing!

This bird was also aged and sexed as a first-year female although on seeing these photos I'm beginning to doubt the sexing of the first bird? It could just be the different lighting but it appears to be much paler than this one. Advise from anyone with more  experience of the species is very welcome!

Over the past few winters we have caught (or narrowly missed) several Shorties whilst they were on freshly caught prey items - Lapwing (2), Redshank, Knot and Fieldfare. I'm staggered at the size of prey they will tackle - Short-eared Owls weigh around 300g whereas a Lapwing weighs about 250g and a Redshank about 150g so that's a half to well over two-thirds their own body weight! They are clearly fearsome predators of waders and surprisingly nocturnal too!

PS Since this post went live some concern has been expressed to BTO by another ringer that these owls may have been near starvation and that is why they were reluctant to fly off! By way of reassurance I can confirm that both these owls were perfectly fit and healthy and weighed 309g and 335g respectively - well within normal limits. TC.