Bird Ringing on the Northmoor Trust Estate
During the summer months (April to October) ringing is carried out on the Little Wittenham Nature Reserve on the Northmoor Trust Estate.
Each bird is fitted with a light metal ring, engraved with a unique letter/number combination obtained from the British Trust for Ornithology(BTO)
For adult birds, mist nets are set up in specially reserved areas away from the public and monitored at frequent intervals. Birds are gently removed from the nets by trained personnel and taken to a nearby area to be examined and ringed.
Bird Information
Information about the birds including age, sex, wing length, whether breeding, moult stage and physical condition, is stored in a BTO-supplied computer database managed by the local ringing team. Regular updates from this are sent to the BTO central database for use in their research and to allow identification of birds away from Little Wittenham.
Constant Effort Survey
Since 2000, 12 of the ringing visits every year have been made as part of BTO's Constant Effort Survey, which is designed mainly to monitor the breeding population of an area; visits must be within a set of given dates, always with the same number of nets in the same positions. This allows comparison between years at the same site and between sites around the country.
Bird Ringing Data
The run of only 5 years is really too short for any meaningful trends to emerge, but it is already clear that blackcaps are unusually abundant compared with similar sites elsewhere. This has been confirmed by the BTO.
Details of numbers of birds ringed on the reserve(including both Constant Effort and other visits) are given in the table below.
About 1 in 10 of the birds ringed on the reserve are retrapped one or more times on or near it, which provides some insight into the life expectancy and site fidelity of the Ringing totals for Little Wittenham Nature Reserve.
More information on Bird Ringing at Little Wittenham Nature Reserve.
