Rock Pipit colour ringing project Hilbre

Rock Pipits are fairly common on Hilbre in winter and over the last few years we've had a small breeding population Many of these birds have been ringed but the problem is they have to get recaught by a ringer to get any subsequent data on survival or site fidelity. To make birds more identifiable in the field we've registered and got permission to start a project fitting indivudually lettered darvic rings to the right leg. Hopefully these will be more easily read in the field and provide more data to help us understand the population dynamics of this species on the island.

The small breeding population  is supplemented by passage birds from Scandinavia during the spring and autumn. We have previously controlled a Norwegian darvic marked Rock Pipit. We have long suspected that some of our passage birds are of the Scandinavian race ‘littoralis’ and this control bears this out.

Scandinavian Rock Pipits are a feature of the Dee estuary during the winter but we don't know if some oof these birds are using Hilbre as a staging post or whether it is a separate wintering population with noo interchange. Hopefully we can answer these questions and a a few more.

The aims of the project are to:

 

• Study adult survival rates and site fidelity of the resident population.
• Monitor the breeding population due to increased visitor footfall to the island.
• Dispersal of fledged young of the resident population.
• Find out if our population shows site fidelity.
• Determine origin of spring and autumn migrants and what proportion of these over winter on Hilbre and what proportion use the island as a staging post.
• Whether there is any interchange between birds that winter on the mainland with those on Hilbre.

At the time of writing two birds have already been colour ringed and and one (CAB) has already been re-sighted in the field on Hilbre with the ring read at close ranges using binoculars.