A pied wagtail with its ringed leg.
NATURE NOTESMUCH has been discovered about birds by watching and counting them, but such methods rarely allow birds to be identified as individuals.
This is essential for learning about how long they live and when and where they move; questions that are vital for bird conservation.
Placing a lightweight, uniquely numbered, metal ring around a bird’s leg provides a reliable and harmless method of identifying birds as individuals.
Radar has been a useful tool for tracking mass migration, and now modern electronics allows individual larger birds to be tracked by satellite.
Although ringing birds in Britain and Ireland has been going on for 100 years, new facts are still being discovered about migration routes and wintering areas, and with global warming, changes are also being monitored. However, the main focus of ringing these days is to monitor bird populations.
Birds can be caught in special, very light, fine-meshed nets (by trained and licensed experts). Large numbers of ground-feeding birds, such as waders and geese, may be trapped by larger nets fired with cannons. Some birds are ringed as nestlings, which means that nets do not have to be used and the bird can be tracked for its whole life — long or short.
Ringing allows us to study how many young birds leave the nest and survive to become adults, as well as how many adults survive the stresses of breeding, migration and severe weather.
Changes in survival rates and other aspects of bird biology help us to monitor and hopefully understand the causes of population declines.
Each ring has an address and number so that anyone finding a ringed bird can help by reporting where and when it was found and what happened to it (
www.ring.ac). Some ringing projects also use colour rings to allow birds to be identified without being re-caught or found dead.
Ringers usually work at bird observatories and other special ringing sites. These are often on islands or headlands where lots of migrants pass through. This is why the Island is an important site, but until now there has not been an organised ringing group here.
Groups have to be registered with the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and be formally constituted. The IW Ringing Group (IWRG) has just been accepted and licensed by the BTO and will combine the work of the ringers on the Island.
The objectives of the group are to study the bird populations and migrations on the IW and to analyse and publish the results, sharing the information with ringers through the European scheme, with naturalists, conservation bodies and local authorities.
This will help towards the general knowledge and understanding of conservation issues. There has been a long-standing colour ringing project of pied wagtails on Ryde Pier.
A yellow or red plastic ring is put on as well as the metal ring. We have had viewing information from as far away as Scotland.
Any sightings, giving date, place and ideally which leg has the coloured ring on, would be extremely valuable and can be reported on
IWRingingGroup@googlemail.com, from where further information can also be obtained. You can find out more information about bird ringing generally on the BTO website at
www.bto.org/ringing/.
Although you have to hold a full BTO ringing permit to be a full member of the IWRG, the group will offer training to suitable people, juniors and seniors, and you can be an associate member if you wish to help, but do not wish to train for the relevant licence.
The group also intends to undertake educational demonstrations and lectures, so you may be lucky enough to get first-hand reports of their work, and what it means.