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| Country diary: ringing the changes in the bird population | Country diary: ringing the changes in the bird population |
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| Bedgebury Pinetum, Kent Checked and weighed by surer hands than mine, I felt the hollow-boned weightlessness of a blue tit in the cup of my palm | |
| Alex Preston | |
| Tue 28 Nov 2017 05.30 GMT | |
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| There’s something extraordinary about holding a bird in the palm of your hand. For me, out bird-ringing with volunteers from the British Trust for Ornithology one brisk November morning, it was a blue tit. It had been checked and weighed by surer hands than mine and then placed delicately in the cup of my palm. A familiar bird transformed by such proximity. I felt the hollow-boned weightlessness of it, the fast-fluttering life that sat there for a moment, looking around with black-bead eyes. Its feathers were iridescent in the low slant of the winter sun. Then it was gone, up into the trees, and it was as if I’d lost something precious. | There’s something extraordinary about holding a bird in the palm of your hand. For me, out bird-ringing with volunteers from the British Trust for Ornithology one brisk November morning, it was a blue tit. It had been checked and weighed by surer hands than mine and then placed delicately in the cup of my palm. A familiar bird transformed by such proximity. I felt the hollow-boned weightlessness of it, the fast-fluttering life that sat there for a moment, looking around with black-bead eyes. Its feathers were iridescent in the low slant of the winter sun. Then it was gone, up into the trees, and it was as if I’d lost something precious. |
| We were at Bedgebury Pinetum in Kent just after dawn. It was a blustery day and the pines soughed and sighed, the resident ravens cronking overhead. High in the canopy were hawfinches and crossbills, birds that twitchers come from miles to see. We had set mist nets near the pinetum’s eastern edge, up above the lily pond. These nets are so fine as to appear transparent to the birds, who fly into soft pockets and are gently dandled until they can be extracted, ringed and measured. | We were at Bedgebury Pinetum in Kent just after dawn. It was a blustery day and the pines soughed and sighed, the resident ravens cronking overhead. High in the canopy were hawfinches and crossbills, birds that twitchers come from miles to see. We had set mist nets near the pinetum’s eastern edge, up above the lily pond. These nets are so fine as to appear transparent to the birds, who fly into soft pockets and are gently dandled until they can be extracted, ringed and measured. |
| The morning was a reminder of something that you feel a lot of birdwatchers lose sight of – how little we know of even the most common garden birds. The BTO’s work – measuring, weighing, ringing and recording birds – is at its most glamorous when something rare and exotic appears, but cataloguing long-term trends in the movements of our most familiar birds is just as important. The rings that the intensively trained, extraordinarily calm and dextrous volunteers fit on the birds allow the BTO to track migration routes, survival rates, feeding patterns. Ringing is a vast, global, collective effort, and one largely undertaken by unpaid bird-lovers and environmentalists. | The morning was a reminder of something that you feel a lot of birdwatchers lose sight of – how little we know of even the most common garden birds. The BTO’s work – measuring, weighing, ringing and recording birds – is at its most glamorous when something rare and exotic appears, but cataloguing long-term trends in the movements of our most familiar birds is just as important. The rings that the intensively trained, extraordinarily calm and dextrous volunteers fit on the birds allow the BTO to track migration routes, survival rates, feeding patterns. Ringing is a vast, global, collective effort, and one largely undertaken by unpaid bird-lovers and environmentalists. |
| Through these rings, we know how many of Bedgebury’s tiny goldcrests and firecrests – the country’s smallest birds – fly across the North Sea to summer in Scandinavia. We are able to track the recent fall in blue tit numbers due to a scarcity of caterpillars (a chick can eat up to 100 a day). We are able to learn more about the elusive migration routes of waxwings, fieldfares, house martins and terns. Bird-ringing doesn’t tell us everything about the lives of these fascinating, unearthly creatures, but it provides important clues about how and where human activity, and in particular climate change, is having its most profound impact. | Through these rings, we know how many of Bedgebury’s tiny goldcrests and firecrests – the country’s smallest birds – fly across the North Sea to summer in Scandinavia. We are able to track the recent fall in blue tit numbers due to a scarcity of caterpillars (a chick can eat up to 100 a day). We are able to learn more about the elusive migration routes of waxwings, fieldfares, house martins and terns. Bird-ringing doesn’t tell us everything about the lives of these fascinating, unearthly creatures, but it provides important clues about how and where human activity, and in particular climate change, is having its most profound impact. |
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