EURING Newsletter - Volume 1, November 1996

EUROPEAN RINGING SCHEMES: WHO'S WHO

The questionnaire: some brief remarks on the results

We first of all wish to thank all schemes for sending their replies to the questionnaire. The meaning of this initiative is to offer all schemes an overwiev of the activities of the other centres, with contacts and names of all staff members. These data allow a general sketch of the present situation of scientific bird ringing in Europe. We decided to limit the extension of our comments, since we hope the questionnaire will be an opportunity for further notes from the staff and ringers of the different schemes. We will be happy to accept comments and publish them in the next issue.

1. Staff, (Table 1, Fig. 1): most schemes have got at least one full-time staff, the most frequent situation being represented by a couple of people. Only a fraction of the centres have to rely on volunteers or part-time involvement of single persons; on the opposite extremes the few schemes run by 9-10 people staff.

2. Ringings, (Table 1, Fig. 2): most schemes ring between 50,000 and 100,000 birds/year, for a total of approximately 4,000,000 ringed birds at the continental scale. Most European ringers ring some 500 birds/year (Fig. 4), with rather few exceptions of single ringers able to mark over 1,500 birds. The average value may be influenced by the predominant role songbirds may play within the activity of some of the schemes, when compared to the situation of those centres more concentrated on non- passerine species.

A yearly average number of 174 different species are ringed by each scheme (Table 1), with a range of variation between less than 50, to over 300 bird species. Thanks to all possible variations in habitat typologies sampled by the ringers, trapping and ringing techniques and special projects, EURING is undoubtedly able to gather information from a huge range of species both breeding and migrating through the continent.

3. Ringers, (Table 1, Fig. 3): nearly one third of the schemes rely on the activity of less than 50 ringers, while a comparable number of cases refers to schemes with over 300 ringers. Three centres involve over 500 ringers, while the B.T.O. in U.K. is the only case of over 2.000 licensed ringers.

4. Ringing courses and exams, (Table 1): an almost equal percentage is found between schemes which routinely organise ringing courses and those which don't. For a slightly higher percentage of 60.6% of the centres, passing an exam is a pre-requisite for getting a ringing license. Given the growing demand for high quality information gathered through ringing, and the increasing potential represented by large-scale co-ordinated ringing projects based on standardised field methods, more attention should be paid within EURING in order to optimise ways and protocols to be followed when issuing a new ringing license.

5. Ringing reports, (Table 1): annual ringing reports are very important in order to have a general overwiev of ringing activities at the European level. Most schemes (61%) regularly produce such reports, 24% are not able to do so, while 15% of the centres have, for different reasons, stopped issuing their annual reports.
Only 18% of the centres send their reports on floppy to the EDB; this situation could be improved, in order to facilitate the work of the EDB manager in compiling, and hence making available, the annual totals of birds ringed within EURING.

6. Recoveries, (Table 1): a bit less than 500 foreign recoveries are processed every year by the single schemes. This makes an overall total of more than 15,000 recoveries originating from birds ringed in Europe, with an annual recovery rate of about 0.4% of the ringed birds. Over 2,500 own recoveries are annually processed by each centre, with schemes gathering more than 10,000!

In total, EURING is able to collect and code in a standard format over 100,000 recoveries and controls in a single year, a huge set of data offering a great potential for analyses! This situation could be further improved by having more national schemes allowing their ringers to code and computerise recoveries.

7. Data management: the handling of ringing and recovery data is at the moment going through a positive period of fast development. Most schemes are computerising recovery data, which makes these available to be included in the EURING Data Bank, and all efforts have to be made in order to support the centres which still have to start. Only a third of the centres routinely computerise ringing data, and this is a situation we surely have to improve if we want to be able to use these crucial information for survival analyses. Having ringing data computerised is requested by most of the analytical models produced also thanks to the EURING Technical meetings and, as a matter of fact, several schemes distribute special software to their ringers in order to have them computerise ringing data. Some centres already get a large fraction of ringing data computerised by the ringers, the example being represented by the 100% received by the Dutch centre!

8. E-mail connections: nearly half of the schemes are already connected by e-mail. This is quite interesting, given the possibility of using this fast and cheap method to exchange data among schemes (see also the EDB section in this issue).

9. Final remarks: brief reports on the organisation of all ringing schemes has traditionally been an agenda item at all EURING General meetings. We hope the information collated in this newsletter will be a useful material already available for a quick reference already during the next meeting in Praha. We kindly ask all schemes to send in variations or additions to what reported in their replies to the questionnaire, in order to circulate an updated version before the meeting next autumn. This will leave time to analyse the situation of each scheme within the more general context, and hopefully stimulate discussion at the General meeting.

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