Ngihlala eNingizimu Afrika.: Bird Ringing

Last weekend, two of my American friends and I went bird ringing with a biology classmate. It was a celebration of 30 years of bird ringing in that location, so there were quite a lot of people there to see the birds. The sun rises at about 5am here, so we had to wake up at 4. We went to a nature reserve and in the morning darkness, they put up these 3m-high nets.

(This picture was taken a few hours later.)

Then we waited for birds to get caught in the nets. It didn’t take long.

Over the course of the day, dozens of birds were caught. The people remove them by first untangling their feet, then grasping them around their bodies, and finally releasing the beaks from the net. Then they put the birds in little bags to wait.

Two of the experts took the birds out of the bags, impressively identified their species, sex, and age (juvenile or adult), weighed them, and measured the length of their tails, wings and beaks. They also recorded the age of each wing feather; the old ones are tattered and faded, and the newest ones that are just coming in are still short. Then they put a metal ring with identifying numbers around the bird’s leg. They have to be careful with this bird because it can make your fingers bleed if it bites you. I got to release a few of the birds after everything was recorded.

There’s some huge database of all the birds that are ringed so people can learn about the distribution and abundance of various species. They also often catch birds that have already been ringed so they can learn about how birds migrate during their lives and how long they live (someone found a robin that lived for 33 years). The guy who was ringing seemed to have the motto “All birds are interesting,” but here are some of the prettiest ones.

This is a barn swallow. These migrate from Europe to Africa every year. Once they found a bird in South Africa that was ringed in England, and birds ringed here were found as far away as Latvia.