Hey Blog! Last Sunday was one of the most exciting days in my life so far: I was actually able to hold a bird! This was all at a bird-ringing session. Last month I turned 12, and it happened that there was a bird-ringing session on my birthday. We booked it, but unfortunately it was cancelled because of the high winds. However, it was able to be rescheduled, and last Sunday was the day for it.
Birds are marvels of nature. When the dinosaurs died out, they left descendants behind: birds! These modified-dinosaur, feather-winged, size- shape- and colour-varying creatures are an entire class (Avies, from the Latin word for bird) of their own, under the phylum Chordata. Birds have amazed humans for centuries, and still continue to do so – me included!
There are a few things to check before you ring and release a bird. These are species, age, wing length, weight, sex, and ring number.
- Species is the easiest, and comes first, as all the others depend on it. We had blue tits, a great tit, a goldfinch, a wren, and two long-tailed tits. Unfortunately, all these species require different methods for working out the other information!
- Wing length is pretty easy, you just have to hold the bird up against a ruler, and read the answer.
- With sex, you might be able to tell by its plumage, but otherwise it’s a bit harder – you might need to judge by brightness of the feathers and the weight for example.
- Age is the most difficult. For blue tits, you check the colour on the primary coverts, but most of the others required a whole-bird-lookover. In the nest, they concentrate on getting their wing feathers grown, and only at their first moult change their body feathers. By looking at the quality of the body feathers you can tell whether they are a second+ year bird, or only a first-year.
- It turns out that there is actually a good use for old camera film canisters (Get your grandparents to explain “film” to you!) and that is to put birds in to weigh them! With a set of mini scales, you can pop a bird in one of these tubes and find their weight. Most small garden birds are around the 10 – 15 gram mark, with wrens being more like eight grams.
- Ring number depends on the size of the bird’s leg, and whichever one you pull off the string it comes on. This ring is important because it is like an ID card for a bird, if you can imagine the avian equivalent of a something that weighs as much as a mobile phone and is permanently attached to your leg!
Holding the birds was the best part of it. It was so cute to feel their breathing and heartbeat beneath your fingers. It could be called kind of “emotional”! You had to hold their neck with your first two fingers and form a gentle cage with your hand. Here is a picture of me holding a blue tit:
At the end of the session we went to see the mist nets used to trap the birds. They are just like mist: hardly visible. If you didn’t know they were there, you’d probably walk straight into them! Fifteen minutes later, after the end of the session, we could see a small something flapping in the net, so the next group obviously had one bird at least to ring!