RINGING WITH A PURPOSE Spring 2001

The movements and migration of birds have always fascinated me, so when the opportunity presented itself in 1957 I took up ringing being trained by our founding chairman John Barnes.  I only ringed one brood of swallows while training but one of them was found the following  December in South Africa. This certainly fired my interest further; little did I realise at the time how lucky I was to get this recovery. Dave Sharpe has concentrated on swallows in recent years and has ringed 4504 nestlings to date but he has had only one recovery abroad, in Morocco this last autumn! To keep myself busy since I retired from Leighton I have taken on the secretaryship of the North Lancashire Ringing Group from Bob Marsh. One of the tasks I have undertaken is to assemble all the recoveries from ringing in the area. Members of the Group have ringed a total of at least 210,000 birds in our area since 1957. These have generated somewhere in the region of 3500 recoveries, a lot of information. Let me share with you some of our more interesting results.

We are all familiar with redwing as a reasonably common winter visitor. Our ringing has shown that our birds breed in Scandinavia with reports from Finland and Norway. But birds ringed in the winter in our area have been reported in following winters in Italy (2) Greece, France and Portugal and most surprisingly in Azerbaydzhan close to the Caspian Sea and almost in Iran! The recoveries in France and Portugal may be birds that have moved south in the course of a winter perhaps driven south by cold weather in Britain. But the other recoveries prove that redwing can change their wintering areas from one year to the next. Was this due to their mating with a bird that wintered elsewhere and they retained the pair bond through the winter necessitating a change in wintering area for one partner? Certainly it was probably better to winter in Britain for in all cases the birds were shot when wintering abroad!

Many of our wintering blackbirds have been proved to be winter visitors with recoveries in the breeding season in Norway (5) Sweden (4) Denmark and North Germany (2). But there is no evidence of birds moving to other wintering areas in following winters as there is in redwing.

Lots of effort has gone into ringing waders on the Bay. In the early days this meant nocturnal mist netting sessions out on the sandflats. This was later replaced by cannon netting, which resulted in much larger catches during more sociable hours. We have now been able to work out the migration strategy of knot. These birds, so much a part of the winter scene on the Bay breed in Greenland where we have had 29 recoveries most of them on the North American side of that vast, mainly ice covered country. Two recoveries on Ellesmere Island Canada (one ringed as a nestling) raises the question as to why they cross the north Atlantic to winter in Europe when it seems easier, (as part of the population does) to move down the East coast of North America. Eight two recoveries in Iceland (all bar 3 of birds caught and released) prove they use Iceland as a re-fuelling halt on both the spring and autumn migration.  In late summer almost all our wintering Knot moult along the shores of the North Sea, especially the Waddenze and the Wash. They move to the west coast over the autumn and early winter and set off from there in early spring back to Greenland and Canada via Iceland.

We tend to think of birds migrating quickly in a purposeful way. Colour ringing has shown this is not always the case. A Mediterranean gull hatched in Holland moved to Dorset, Cornwall, Kent, Dyfed and Donegal before breeding on the Allen Pool four years after ringing! The black winged stilt which spent two days on the Eric Morecambe Pool in June 1993 was seen next day in Oxford, two days later in Kent then two more days in Suffolk. It had been born in France and had spent it first spring in Holland!

One of the birds closely associated with the Society is pied flycatcher. Nest boxes, put up in the 1960's & 70's by Chester Mockett and others were instrumental in establishing the bird as a breeder. The Ringing Group has continued these schemes and a total of 4541 have been ringed since 1967, most of them as nestlings. One fondly thinks that the nestlings that survive will return to breed in our area. Ringing though has established that although some do return and breed locally, quite a lot move to breed on their return in other areas. Our birds have been found nesting in Cumbria (8) North Yorkshire (2) Durham, Northumberland, Shropshire, Wales (4) and Scotland (3). The furthest movement was one hatched at Claughton and found breeding on the shores of Loch Katrine 268 km to the north. But others are even more adventurous. One from Aughton was caught, presumably on passage, the following early May in North Holland and then was found breeding in June in Denmark and another was found breeding in west Germany.

Heysham Reserve has been a focal point for ringing in the area. Perhaps the most outstanding finding here has been the discovery that many of the species we usually consider sedentary do wander quite a lot. Interesting recoveries include a spring wren found a year later in Cheltenham 247-km south. Most surprising though were 2 long-tailed tits ringed on 2nd October were caught 19 days later in Central Scotland 306 km to the north. Rather a strange time of year to be moving north! Speed of movement is shown by a Goldcrest ringed on 18^th October and caught next day on Anglesey 138-m south-west. Perhaps the most spectacular Heysham recovery was a winter ringed water rail, found in Russia the following June. To see a water rail fly a few yards is quite unusual; to think of them flying this distance is remarkable.

Of course much ringing effort is directed to understanding the survival and productivity of birds especially those perceived to be under threat.  One of our major contributions has been my bearded tit study at Leighton. Over 9 years the adult survival at ca 53% has been similar each year, but juvenile survival to the next year has varied between 9% in 1992 and 60% in 1997. But ringing over such a long period has revealed changes in populations. Perhaps the most explicit are our ringing numbers for our two breeding buntings. In 1965 I ringed 66 yellowhammers on our small farm at Warton, they were mainly coming to seed in winter. We haven't ringed a yellowhammer since 1986 when we ringed just three. There are just no birds to ring these days. Reed bunting ringing at Leighton Moss peaked at 259 in 1979. Last year with similar effort we caught only 25. In both species I am sure the lack of winter feeding areas has caused the decline. I was talking to an Agricultural Contractor the other day and he told me that in the 1950's and 60's up to a third of fields were arable in our area, providing a plentiful supply of weed seeds and waste grain, now it is almost complete grass farming with few weed seeds.

The ages that birds attain is also of great interest. Our record is a lesser-black-backed gull ringed in 1965 as a nestling and culled on the Tarnbrook Gullery 35 years later! We have a 7 year old bearded tit still going strong. A mute swan lived to 21 a shelduck to 11, a 10-year-old knot and a 9-year-old blue tit. A more careful search of our retrap records would probably reveal many more old timers!

Ringing also reveals how birds die. Of 24 robins reported as dead no fewer than 9 were killed by cats, 2 were road casualties, avian predators killed 3 and 2 flew into windows. These results are probably biased, as a bird killed by a cat is more likely to be found by someone than one killed by a sparrowhawk, but they do show the toll that our moggies take. Some interesting causes of death are also revealed, how did a starling drown itself in a toilet in Todmorden, or why did a reed warbler fly into a patio window in Liversedge Yorkshire?

The ringing Group would like to put on record their thanks for the support the Society has given over the years; it is very much appreciated. Anyone interested in helping with ringing should contact me in the first instance. We are always interested in hearing of locations of roosts especially swallows and wagtails.

John Wilson