EURING Newsletter - Volume 1, November 1996

COLOUR RINGING AND VISUAL MARKING
(a very useful tool and a long-debated issue!)

The organisation and international co-ordination of colour ringing and visual marking is a traditional source of problems within (as well as outside!) EURING. Hours have been spent at every General meeting trying to find solutions which may in the meantime offer as wide an opportunity as possible to increase the number of recoveries through visual sightings, but yet keep an efficient control on ringers’ activities.

This section of our newsletter will offer all schemes an opportunity to introduce colour ringing projects, maintain regular contacts between the schemes and the international co-ordinators, have an updated overview of what’s going within EURING. We hope all of you will make use of this slot, in order to improve what is still quite often a difficult situation.

The picture presented below is still far from complete, as there are many other species in which colour marking programs are properly run (e.g. Flamingo, Cormorant, etc.); we hope we’ll be able to offer a more complete list of all schemes in the next issues. In the meantime, for a recent general overview of many current projects, see the paper by Renaud Flamant in Aves 31: 65-186.

Introduction. The co-ordination of colour-marking schemes causes many problems to ringing schemes. Most ringing schemes have systems set up to deal with local birds but for birds who migrate over long distances central co-ordination of marking on each flyway is essential.

Difficulties occur in ensuring that all schemes are registered and that there are no clashes between schemes. Tracing sightings is often impossible, sometimes because the sightings are incomplete but also because the Ringing Scheme may not know who is using particular colour-marks. This can cause public relation problems as the scheme is unable to tell the person who reported the bird anything about it.

To try and alleviate the problems with colour marking EURING has designated a number of co-ordinators for the species which cause most problems. The current EURING colour marking co-ordinators are:

Waders
Wader Study Group
Stephen Browne & Harriet Mead.
The National Centre for Ornithology, The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk, IP24 2PU, UK

Large Gulls (Lesser Black-backed, Greater Black-backed, Herring and Yellow-legged Gull)
Peter Rock
59 Concorde Drive, Westbury on Trym, Bristol, BS10 6PX, UK

Small Gulls (Black-headed, Mediterranean and Common Gull)
Kjeld Pedersen
Daglykkevej, 7, DK-2650 Hvidovre, Denmark

Wildfowl (Geese and Swans)
Wetlands International
11 Marijkeweg, PO Box 7002, 6700 AC Wageningen, The Netherlands

Raptors
Guy Jarry
Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle
55, rue Buffon, 75005 Paris, France
Tel. +33 1 40 79 30 78
Fax +33 1 40 79 38 35

Central co-ordination for these species has helped to avoid the duplication of schemes and has led to far more sightings being identified than was the case previously. Reproduced below is an article from the Wader Study Group Bulletin about the wader colour marking schemes. It was written by Jane Marchant who co-ordinated the scheme before it was taken over recently by Stephen and Harriet. I hope this is useful to member schemes. We intend to have information about colour marking in each of these newsletters to try and alleviate the problems associated with this extremely useful marking method in future.

Jacquie Clark
EURING General Secretary

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