Bird rings

The weather today was pretty awful (blowing a gale and trying to snow) and not at all conducive to outdoors photography. I found these bird rings on my desk and played about with some still life/macro photography.

All of the rings are from, sadly, birds that are no longer with us. I believe that the largest ring was from a Griffon Vulture, the white ring with F97 is from one of the local House Sparrows and the other's are mainly from Blackbirds.

I must point out that i am fully trained and licensed to catch and ring birds for scientific purposes and have carried out projects in England, Scotland, Wales, Gibraltar, Canada and Cape Verde. All the rings applied to birds have a unique number and from the data returned (i.e. if the bird is recaptured by another ringer/bander or if the bird is found dead and reported) we can tell many things including how long the bird has lived, where it has travelled to and for certain projects we can gain much information on population dynamics. Adding a ring to a birds leg does not affect the bird at all - to do so would defeat the object of doing this in the first place. It can be likened to us wearing a watch or bracelet.

There is more information about bird ringing in the UK available on the British Trust for Ornithology website at: http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/ringing/ringing-scheme