Colour ringing scheme

Monday, February 8th 2010

This Bullfinch was ringed today as part of the new colour ringing scheme at Foxglove. We hope that he might be sighted by visitors to the reserve using their binoculars.

We are running two schemes one for Blackbirds and one for Bullfinches and the colour combinations are the same for both species. If you look carefully you can see that the rings on this bird match those on 'Bossy Blackbird' (see the last post) as they were both the second birds to be ringed on their scheme! They both have a red plastic ring over a metal BTO ring on their left legs and a plastic red ring over a plastic green one on their right legs. Below is a beautiful male Siskin that was also ringed today with a metal BTO ring.

A major bird ringing threshold was crossed by the end of the afternoon as the number of birds banded on the reserve passed the 40,000 mark. This really is a remarkable achievement and a very substantial number spread over 75 species. The top five species ringed in order of priority are 1st: Chaffinch at 6048, 2nd: Greenfinch at 4089, 3rd: Willow Warbler at 3857, 4th: Blue Tit at 3423 and 5th: Great Tit at 2681. Numbers and species have fluctuated over the years but there are relatively few serious changes with the expansion of Coal Tit, Lesser Repoll and Reed Bunting numbers recently the most noticeable development.

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