Tiny rings that reveal birds’ lives

Purple Sandpiper (Steve Culley)

A colour-ringed Purple Sandpiper at Cemlyn on Sunday is the same one seen in the Anglesey bay last winter, having been ringed in June 2024 at Nidingens bird observatory, an island off southwest Sweden. Only a handful of ringed Purple Sandpipers have moved between Sweden and Britain, and this is the first to Wales. It almost certainly spent the intervening summers in Svalbard, the Norwegian island archipelago north of the Arctic Circle, since that is where most Purple Sandpipers ringed at Nidingens go to breed.

Ringing provides valuable information on breeding success, survival rates and other data to inform conservation, but movements are the most immediately fascinating. The latest Ringing Report from the British Trust for Ornithology, to be published in the forthcoming 2024 Welsh Bird Report, includes a Dunlin that winters in the Menai Strait which was recaught by a ringer in Estonia in August; a Sandwich Tern chick ringed at Cemlyn that was found sick at a Congolese wetland later that autumn; and a Pied Flycatcher ringed as a chick in Denbighshire’s Ceiriog Valley in 2015 that was bred in a wood south of Welshpool in 2024, making it one of the oldest British Pied Flycatchers on record. The report’s most bizarre record is a Red Kite from Ceredigion, ringed as a chick in 1998, whose legs were displayed in a Sussex antique shop last year labelled as a racing pigeon… What story lies behind this?

Ringers train for years to ensure the birds’ welfare is paramount, but we can all contribute to the collected knowledge by reporting colour-ringed birds and checking dead birds for leg rings, mindful of current advice to avoid handling birds with bare skin.

A male Bufflehead spent a couple of hours on the Dee estuary at RSPB Point of Ayr on Monday. This North American seaduck is potentially the first wild record for Wales, but its popularity in ornamental wildfowl collections is a headache for the British Birds Rarities Committee that considers the merit of such records. In this case, a leg ring might indicate a captive origin, although none is evident on photos seen so far.
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Other birds off our coast this week include two Black-necked Grebes and seven Slavonian Grebes in the Menai Strait, a Red-necked Grebe in Holyhead harbour, and Surf Scoters off Old Colwyn and Llanddulas. Last week’s sightings featured a Black Redstart at Kinmel Bay, Firecrest at RSPB Conwy and the long-staying Shorelark on the Great Orme.