Wednesday 7 December 2016

A goose chase with a continental twist

Following on from the 5 Nov post, further news on collared goose 7VBY.  As it and its mate 9ABY have settled for the winter at Regneville, a trip was arranged to try and download the data from this GPS collared bird. I headed across on the cross channel ferry and met up with Bruno Chevalier, Alain Livory & Rosalyne Coulomb, three key contributors to our goose resighting family from this beautiful La Manche department in Normandy.

A few minor fieldwork issues to contend with: firstly the collars have moved into a battery saving ‘winter mode’ so only try and talk to the receiver every 12 hours. This of course means one of these times is after dark, and, as it happens, one early in the morning. Lovely clear skies meant for some sub-zero temperatures as we stood out on the saltmarsh in the dark listening to the roosting geese cackling gently out on the estuary. Lovely stars but no download acquired alas, although the problem with looking at geese in the dark is not knowing which rings are present!

So a repeat attempt was made the following morning while the birds were out preening on the sandbanks. Unfortunately once more no download was successful, although one hour later we did get excellent views of the flock, including 7VBY & 9ABY as they came out to graze on the saltmarsh. It’s an interesting wintering population as the flock is a mix of pale-bellied (hrota) and dark-bellied (bernicla) races, and there are now around 20 ringed birds from the hrota flyway wintering here in amongst the >1000 individuals. These include birds ringed in late Spring in Dublin, and also Icelandic ringed birds (as with 7VBY & 9ABY which were ringed in Kolgrafafjordur in May this year). Lots of juveniles of both races apparent in the flock as well. Indeed, the saltmarsh grazing areas have excellent catching potential, and with fine company and the delights of French cuisine to sample, I think this bears serious consideration!


My thanks to Bruno for hosting me, and to Bruno, Alain & Rosalyne for taking the time to show me their patch and stand around in subzero temperatures while I just stood there pointing an aerial out to sea! They have kindly agreed to try again, so hopefully we will learn in more depth about 7VBY’s travels.

Tuesday 6 December 2016

Colour marked everythings...

As Adam has reminded me there are lots of colour-marked birds out there with plain or engraved rings. Too numerous to list here but excluding Brent and wader spp there are ...
gulls, terns, dippers, raptors, different species of geese, swans.... Lots of things. Feel free to add details of your colour-marking project in comments here. The new Irish ringers Facebook page is also worth it?

Colour-marked waders

In the last few months I've read colour rings on Oystercatchers (Icelandic), a Knot (poss ringed in Iceland) and Black-tailed Godwit. As with our Brent such observations are invaluable to the co-ordinators of those projects. Information on Godwits and other waders is available in this very interesting series of articles by Graham Appleton. Worth a read : https://wadertales.wordpress.com/about/

Monday 5 December 2016

Reasons for my Repetitive Strain Injuries...

Tonight saw another milestone in my management of the database - I crossed the 180,000 records entered mark!!
This is how it looks in the bottom shelf of the bookcase in my office:




Each colour of file represents yet another collated year's collection from you, our observers, upon we so much depend.
Well done, all of you!!