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A Ring to Far (1 Viewer)

J

jtwood

Well-known member
I photographed this Knot in Shetland this week with 6 rings on it.
I feel this is way to many and must increase the chances of the bird being caught in fishing Line etc plus the shear discomfort of living its life with so much Bling on its Legs.
I know much useful information is gained from bird ringing but to fit 6 rings on a common species like Knot is it really necessary?
Your views would be appreciated.
Jim Wood
 

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It certainly looks to be a seriously excessive lot of hardwear for it to have to carry around, and at least two of the rings seem to be identical or very similar.
 
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i'll leave the ethical discussion to someone else, but i think the 5 coloured rings are all done as part of a single scheme to allow easy identification of individual birds in the field without trapping (as there are lots of individual birds you need lots of rings to enable lots of unique colour combinations), which is hopefully a more effective way of maximising data from ringed sp. than the traditional metal ring. If you can track down the ringing scheme then you should be able to find out where that bird was first ringed and any subsequent sightings just from the photo.

cheers,
James
 
James is right. Colour ringing studies allow for the movement of individual birds to be easily studied without the need to catch them again. Locally, on the Dee, there are major studies into Black-tailed Godwit and Knot being carried out that have shown "our" Black-tailed Godwit travel as far as Portugal, France, south coast of England and the Ribble as well as the exact route Knot take back to their breeding grounds on Greenland.

Chris
 
James Lowther said:
i'll leave the ethical discussion to someone else, but i think the 5 coloured rings are all done as part of a single scheme to allow easy identification of individual birds in the field without trapping (as there are lots of individual birds you need lots of rings to enable lots of unique colour combinations), which is hopefully a more effective way of maximising data from ringed sp. than the traditional metal ring. If you can track down the ringing scheme then you should be able to find out where that bird was first ringed and any subsequent sightings just from the photo.

cheers,
James
Click to expand...

This could be achieved by using less rings with each ring having different colour combinations. I generally stay out of these ringing debates but I have to say I think that this is ridiculous for the poor bird.
 
Trystan said:
This could be achieved by using less rings with each ring having different colour combinations. I generally stay out of these ringing debates but I have to say I think that this is ridiculous for the poor bird.
Click to expand...

hi Trystan,
fewer rings with smaller colour blocks means you would need to be closer to read the combination so re-identification will occur less frequently. maybe that is a reasonable trade-off but it is still a trade-off.
cheers,
James
 
Discomfort we shall never be in a position to know, but increased vulnerability to (eg) entanglement or predation we might learn from finding out more about this individual; hopefully we shall soon know how long ago it was ringed, at least.
 
MSA said:
Discomfort we shall never be in a position to know, but increased vulnerability to (eg) entanglement or predation we might learn from finding out more about this individual; hopefully we shall soon know how long ago it was ringed, at least.
Click to expand...


Naughty ;) Maybe we could do studies and see how many returns we get over a year with birds with varying numbers of rings ... my money would be on most from 10 ring birds.
 
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I can't do the maths, but I think there are hundreds/thousands of possible permutations of 4 or even 3 rings with 4 or 5 primary easily recognisable colours ...
 
dantheman said:
I can't do the maths, but I think there are hundreds/thousands of possible permutations of 4 or even 3 rings with 4 or 5 primary easily recognisable colours ...
Click to expand...

Agreed....If I can read a metal ring on a Redpoll at 8' from a 30x optical camera...then enlarged 8x....I'm damn sure someone could easily read 'reduced' colour ring permutations from a 30x digi-scoped individual! They'll be putting them in kaleidoscoped Wellingtons next!
 
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ken, it's a simple fact of physics that larger blocks of colour will be visible at greater distances. stick a knot 1km away and those "reduced" rings might not be so easy to read.

again i want to reiterate that there is a balance to be drawn between welfare and recovery data, and i'm not suggesting where that balance is, but it's wrong to pretend that tiny coloured rings will be equally useful as larger ones.

as for the maths i'm probably missing some subtleties but depending how you split them between the legs, with 5 colours to choose from, 3 rings gives 250+ combinations, 4 gives 625+, 5 gives 6250+, 6 gives 15625+

cheers,
james
 
KenM said:
Agreed....If I can read a metal ring on a Redpoll at 8' from a 30x optical camera...then enlarged 8x....I'm damn sure someone could easily read 'reduced' colour ring permutations from a 30x digi-scoped individual! They'll be putting them in kaleidoscoped Wellingtons next!
Click to expand...

Redpolls don't tend to get their metal rings covered in estuary mud, and it's not usually possible to view Knots in your garden. They usually don't like you approaching to 8' out on the mudflats.

For a long-running study of long-lived birds you need tens of thousands of combinations. Knots can live decades - we know this because the longevity record was set by a 27 year old bird...which had colour rings read in the field!

As for 'discomfort' or 'too much', there are currently plenty of Cuckoos and Ospreys flying around with satellite backpacks strapped to them, weighing substantially more than 5 plastic and a single alloy ring. And there are Nightingales, Swifts and House martins flying around with data loggers weighing up to 5% of their body weight. People seem to quite like these projects, despite the obvious greater imposition on the bird. But then photographers don't often snap these satellite transmitters or data loggers and post the pictures on BirdForum to complain about how they look. Colour rings are more obvious to us because that is the point of them. But which is more obvious to the bird?

At the end of the day, was this Knot behaving abnormally? Was it injured? Did it look bothered at all? How long had it lived since being ringed, and how far had it flown (reporting this would tell you)?

In the trade off between the imposition on the bird (not detectable) and the information gathered (on survival, migration, behaviour) there's no contest.
 
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I think the rings are obscene and the Cuckoos and Ospreys flying around with satellite backpacks strapped to them are victims of animal cruelty. Just my opinion.
 
James Lowther said:
ken, it's a simple fact of physics that larger blocks of colour will be visible at greater distances. stick a knot 1km away and those "reduced" rings might not be so easy to read.

again i want to reiterate that there is a balance to be drawn between welfare and recovery data, and i'm not suggesting where that balance is, but it's wrong to pretend that tiny coloured rings will be equally useful as larger ones.

as for the maths i'm probably missing some subtleties but depending how you split them between the legs, with 5 colours to choose from, 3 rings gives 250+ combinations, 4 gives 625+, 5 gives 6250+, 6 gives 15625+

cheers,
james
Click to expand...

Surely a bird with 4 rings of potentially 5 colours would give 1250 combinations (5x5x5x5x2)? However bear in mind that schemes probably shouldnt be using the same two colour next to each other as its difficult to determine in the field (I had great difficultly recently with a Common Sand trying to ascertain if it was two small yellow rings or one large ring - see attached) and the potential number of combinations decrease.

http://www.birdforum.net/showpost.php?p=2775681&postcount=19894
 
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The formula for permutations is n! / (n!-k!) where n is the number of options (i.e the colours of rings) and k is the number of positions (lets say 3, two on the left and one on the right leg to make the maths easier)

The order is important here, arranging the same colours in a different location would identify a different individual so it is the permutation formula above which is to be used.

If you were to use 5 colours (red, blue, green, yellow, white) and theres no reason not to use more, and each colour can be used more than once per bird, that means your value n = 15 (pick any 3 from rrr, bbb, ggg, yyy, www)

=15!/12! = 2730

I dont know how many knot would be ringed typically but if this isnt enough then the number could be increased by using more colours and by using the same colour combinations but sometimes 2 on the left leg and sometimes 2 on the right..
 
The problem is, without colour ringing, we'd know very little about waders ( unless they were caught time and time again). It was always assumed the Sanderling that used the East Atlantic Flyway, and overwintered in Europe were Siberian breeders but, through colour ringing, it turns out they are from NE Greenland and no-ones quite sure where Siberian birds winter. Colour ringing has also helped to show that Sanderling can be very loyal to wintering sites, returning year after year. Last winter, at Hoylake, UK, 3 Sanderling colour ringed in the same small area of NE Greenland were found to be still together, in the same flock, on the wintering grounds. Something that had never been recorded before. Without this kind of knowledge there is no way you can devise a unified plan to protect species. All scientific knowledge is gained by techniques that are invasive, in some way or another, and colour ringing is producing so much information with no known deleterious effects that it would be doing wildlife a disservice, to say the least, to stop.

Chris
 
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