Take A Look

When it rained today I spent a while on the Internet looking at this week’s new BTO initiative announced in their usual low key manner.

Without any obvious fanfare they placed online a tremendous resource for birders, ringers and for local bird report editors and authors that can at the touch of a button produce both online ringing totals and recovery summaries viewable at a country and county level.

Fieldfare

The new development is much more than a simple store of information for ringers because it will prove so fascinating and informative for all birders and students of migration whether ringers or not. Non-ringers may not have heard about the introduction of this facility, but I urge them to take a look at http://www.bto.org/ringing/ringinfo/recovery_summaries.htm

It seems that the coding for this, which was no mean feat in itself, plus the run to extract and tabulate the data took over 8 hours of solid computing time!

There are caveats with some of the data, but this is all explained on the web pages. In particular, not all old (pre 1979) recoveries of birds ringed abroad have been input and the ringing totals are for data sent in electronically by ringers (about 97% at present).

All I can say is congratulations to all concerned and well done the BTO and staff involved. The pages are as fascinating as they are useful and once again it shows how much valuable information is gleaned from ringing birds.

Redwing

Lapwing
The weather looks slightly better for Sunday with a little ridge of high pressure. I may even get some ringing and birding in.

6am Sunday