Confounded metal rings on passerines! (1 Viewer)

[KenM]

FWIW, I find the above frustrating as whenever (rarely) I view a passerine in the field with the above, I know there’s almost no chance of encountering that bird again and or retrieving any information.
That said, I’ve been tracking a local “Grey Notail” with jewellery since January and finally after many attempts, managed to decipher the characters.
Sent the images off to the BTO and got a prompt return.
The bird was rung as a bird of the year in Sep.’21 at Hayling Island, Hants (sex unknown) circa 90 miles to the South West.
Think coloured plastic rings might be better?
Certainly for drawing to the attention of the observer.
As was the case for me a few years back, with an Autumn Stonechat, that sported several coloured rings, which had been controlled some 90 miles to the NEast in Thetford.
Surely for getting “a return” plastic is better than metal?

Cheers

Unexpectedly refound this am….my how your tail has grown in 10 days!

 

[Jos Stratford]

Would be impossible to do on mass with coloured plastic rings - not enough colour combinations (eg one observatory alone in this region rings c100,000 birds per year - you would need that number of combinations for this single site only) and, even if you could produce enough colour combinations, it would also require an impossible amount of coordination between ringing locations (eg how would this site above that rings 100,000 birds know what combinations are being used simultaneously by all other ringers/observatories).

Colour ringing can only be for fairly small scale studies of particular species or locations.

 

[KenM]

Would be impossible to do on mass with coloured plastic rings - not enough colour combinations (eg one observatory alone in this region rings c100,000 birds per year - you would need that number of combinations for this single site only) and, even if you could produce enough colour combinations, it would also require an impossible amount of coordination between ringing locations (eg how would this site above that rings 100,000 birds know what combinations are being used simultaneously by all other ringers/observatories).

Colour ringing can only be for fairly small scale studies of particular species or locations.

Agreed, without the 3 coloured rings on the Stonechat (which caught my eye), I wouldn’t have noticed the bird…that’s the point.

I suspect the “return” on metal passerine rings must be negligible to say the least.
A lot more chance with colour e.g? ascribing a standardised colour and or of several combinations specifically to a territory/country.

Could alert the field birder as to it’s presence of a species with time, age and date being of more use, than not being recorded at all?

Perhaps “flagging large ringing sessions” from a particularly active observatory by the birding media might just alert birders in the field with more sightings being logged…rather than none at all in the time frame.

Surely any sighting is better than none, even though you might not have ALL the information
that you might want from the ring(s), with the country of control (colour) being evident to the observer?

Certainly needs to be thought through, am sure that the current system might just be improved upon, as shown with my Thetford Stonechat…just took if memory serves 3 colours.

Cheers

 

[Richard Dale]

Ken, we don't use metal rings with the intention of birders reading the rings in the field. We ring them in order to recapture the birds, either at the same site in subsequent years to provide survival information (particularly for a site in the Constant Effort Site scheme), or elsewhere to provide information on movements. The 'return' for ringed individuals can be relatively high if you are ringing breeding birds consistently at a single site, as in a CES, as the same birds will return to the same sites year on year, and it is these data that allow the BTO to make accurate estimates of overwinter survival. To give an example, I processed a total of 655 different individual adult birds at one of my sites last year, and 127 of these were already ringed from a previous year. Alongside this, the relative numbers of juveniles ringed provides data relating to year on year changes in productivity.

Until the recent advent of ever smaller GPS and satellite tracking devices, most information on bird movements relied on the sheer number of birds ringed. The chance of getting a recapture or recovery of a single migrant warbler ringed at a coastal observatory might be miniscule, but if you are ringing tens of thousands of them (for example, 48,653 chiffchaffs were ringed in Britain in 2023 alone), you're going to get plenty of recoveries and start to build up a picture of where they are going.

Because of the logistical issues raised by Jos, it's just not possible or desirable to apply colour rings on a large scale. Colour ringing can be, however, a highly effective method for targeted studies at a smaller scale, where field identification of individuals is important and where the possible number of colour combinations is manageable.

 

[DMW]

There's a study demonstrating that colour rings affect mate choice in zebra finches. Obviously not going to be an issue in all passerines, but still...

 

[KenM]

Thanks for the stats Richard, it’s your last paragraph that resonates.👍