Mike makes a very valid point about bird ringing

Having just received the January issue of Bird Watching magazine, I was very interested in reading Mike Weedon’s excellent article regarding ‘readable bird rings.’ I have often wondered why the BTO have never come-up with the idea of making rings more visible and I am sure that after seeing your article, they must do something about it. It reminded me of the time many years ago, birding alone on a very remote part of the coast to the west of Durness in northern Scotland, when I came across a single Pied Wagtail picking insects off clumps of seaweed. It had been ringed, but even having stunningly close views through my scope of this little beauty, I couldn’t read the ring and remember thinking to myself that there must be a better way of making these things much more visible and I think you have come up with a solution. Can you imagine the unbelievable advantages if we were able to identify almost every bird that was ringed without having to recapture it or pull it from the cat’s mouth! I have a male ‘ringed’ Blackbird which inhabits an area around a farm cottage where I have worked for the past nine years, and I am told that he was there at least four years before I turned up. It’s impossible to read the ring without actually catching it and I would love to know his history. I used to assist a ringer and will never forget the time we were checking the nets on a day when there wasn’t much around. However, on one of the rounds there was a Willow Warbler in the bottom shelf of one of the nets. The ring it was wearing revealed that it was as a bird ringed on exactly the same date a year previously in exactly the same area. It never fails to astound me that a bird weighing only a few grams can make such an epic journey across the Sahara and back and navigate back to the same area from where it originated.