2009 marks the 100th anniversary for bird ringing in this country. The very first birds to be ringed were Starlings in 1899 by a schoolteacher in Denmark attempting to track their movements. The idea quickly caught on and two ringing schemes were started in Britain, initially ringing Lapwing chicks in 1909. One of these was recovered in the same year, making it the very first recovery. Why do we ring birds? The primary aims of the schemes were to find out where summer visitors spent the winter and where winter visitors breed. At one time leading ornithologists thought Swallows hibernated under water! A German ornithologist tied a dyed thread to a Swallow to test this idea but when it returned next year the dye was still visible, proving that it did not hibernate under water! The other theory was that Swallows migrated to the other side of the world, crossing such barriers as the Sahara desert. You can see why this debate occurred when faced with two such improbable theories. Bird ringing was eventually to prove the latter theory to be correct. It was in December in Natal that a Farmer found a swallow with a metal label saying “Witherby” High Holborn London on one side and the number B830 on the other. This was the first proof that swallows migrated as far as South Africa. The bird was ringed in a porch in Cheadle Staffordshire on the 6 May 1911. We have learnt a terrific amount about bird migration through ringing schemes but it takes many hours and many thousands of ringed birds before a picture emerges. The recovery rate of rings is less than 5% and with some species a lot less than that. There is still a great deal to be learnt even with some common species. Very little is known about where House Martins winter with fewer than 100 overseas recoveries compared to the Swallows 1,250 and only two of these south of the Sahara.

Ringing birds not only answers questions about bird migration it is also a very useful conservation tool. For example it has shown the decline in Starling numbers is due to reduced over-winter survival of young birds and that the number of adult Sedge Warblers surviving each year is related to rainfall patterns on their African wintering grounds. The answers to these questions is the result of a ringing scheme where fixed mist nets are put up for a set time in the same place each year. There are 120 of these sites in Britain and the number of adult and young birds are compared annually which has provided a great deal of information.

Even though satellite tagging on larger birds is now commonly used as a migration monitoring tool it will never entirely replace the ring as it has a short lifespan, and it will be some years before a Goldcrest can be tagged! However satellite tags can give us a complete picture of a bird’s movement over the entire migration period and has provided some fascinating information, for example the Bar Tailed Godwit crossing the Pacific ocean non stop which was thought impossible before satellite tagging proved otherwise.

Autumn migration each year is a fascinating time for the birdwatcher. Every autumn has a few surprises in store. This year has been no exception with the arrival of a Tufted Puffin briefly in the Swale Estuary, another Pacific Ocean species to appear in the North Atlantic probably via the unfrozen North West Passage. The other excitement this year is a more frequent but very irregular visitor to these shores, the Glossy Ibis. About 37 have been seen from Yorkshire southwards and five of these very handsome birds spent a few weeks at Dungeness in September and October. Glossy Ibis breed in the Mediterranean area and winter in Africa but occasionally, particularly young birds, go in the wrong direction and one of our young visitors has a ring so that we know it came from Donana in Spain. Quite why so many birds in a particular year get it wrong is unknown but does make birdwatching such an exciting and interesting hobby.