Last weekend I joined my friends
at the Wash Wader Ringing Group for a weekend of ringing and colour ring
re-sighting. Arriving on Friday evening I was told that we would be having a
leisurely evening and going out colour ring resighting the next morning. That
was fine with me!
Saturday morning saw me teaming
up with Ron to visit Heacham North and Heacham North North beaches. There are
usually plenty of turnstone and sanderling on this beach and a high proportion
of them are ringed, so the site is normally quite productive. The number of
birds present this morning was quite low but the proportion of turnstone carrying
colour rings was high which provided us with some great data.
Colour rings allow individual
birds to be tracked throughout their lifetime without needing to catch them
more than once. This allows information about longevity and movements to be
collected very easily and without putting any undue stress on the birds. A
morning spent recording fifteen or so individual colour ring combinations is therefore
incredibly valuable.
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| Colour ringed turnstone |
By 9am, we were back at base and
before long we were tucking in to a hearty breakfast which would have to see us
through until tea that evening. By mid-morning we were heading down to Heacham
South Beach where we set two large mesh nets with the hope of catching some
oystercatchers. Catching in the afternoon in lovely warm sunshine is a luxury
that we are unaccustomed to, particularly in March, but a warm, sunny beach also
has its downside when it comes to trying to catch waders… people! The team members positioned
at each end of the beach to chat to members of the public were kept pretty busy
and we even had to send someone out to chat to a photographer who had snuck up
unnoticed over the sea wall and was quite close to standing on the nets by the
time we reached him! That doesn’t happen at 5:30am!
After the visitor had kindly
moved back behind the sea wall, the catching effort resumed but we were not
especially hopeful as the birds seemed to be favouring an area further down the
beach from our nets. Luckily, things came together just in the nick of time
and we were able to make a fantastic catch of 66 oystercatchers and a single
turnstone. We processed the catch on the beach so were able to chat to lots of
interested passers-by and tell them about the work we were doing and the
conservation benefits of ringing.
As we had a decent sized team and
not too many birds, I was able to do some ‘double winging’, which is where two
people measure the wing of the same birds to enable a comparison of their
measurements to be made (some people measure shorter or longer than others).
This data helps to ensure consistency between different ringers. I was very
happy that I was pretty consistent with the person I was being compared to on
every bird!
When we got back to base, Richard
had a quick look at the ringing information for the birds that we had caught
that already had rings on. We were astonished to find that one of the birds had
been ringed back in 1980! We are waiting to hear how old it was when it was
first ringed but whatever the answer, this bird was older than a few of the
ringers.
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| Ringed oystercatcher (not the 34 year old one) |
Being at the Wash on weekends
when the clocks change can be a little confusing as we stay on GMT for the
duration of the trip. Unfortunately, no-one ever tells that to our clever
mobile phones. This year I remembered to switch off the alarm on my
phone and relied instead on the old fashioned alarm clock that my room-mate had
brought with her. Thankfully, this meant that I didn’t get up an hour earlier than necessary as I (and
quite a few others) did last year. Getting up at 5am GMT (6am BST) was bad
enough!
We spent the morning out colour
ring resighting again and this time Ron and I visited Ken Hill looking for
flagged curlew. There weren’t too many birds around on the fields that morning
and we therefore only managed to find and read one flag, but that is still useful
data. The most surprisingly element of the morning was the huge number of brown
hares about – in one field alone, we counted fifteen! We were hoping for a bit
of boxing action, but had to settle for a minor spat.
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| Flagged curlew |
After another hearty breakfast we
held the Group’s AGM before packing up and heading back to our respective parts
of the country.
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