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EURING Newsletter - Volume 3 - July 2001 THE
EURING COMMUNITY: As interesting contributions to this section, Pertti Saurola from Finland and Dare Sere from Slovenia offer an overview of the Helsinki and Ljubliana ringing schemes. Helsinki is an example of the potential ringers can represent in mapping and monitoring breeding bird populations on a national scale, as well as of the historical computerisation of both ringing and recovery data. Ljubliana is a rapidly growing scheme with a fast increase in ringing activities and an active role within co-ordinated EURING projects. THE FINNISH RINGING SCHEME by Pertti Saurola RINGING
CENTRE This contribution is a summary of the activities of the Finnish Ringing Scheme. More detailed information can be found at the home page address above and from the annual "Bird ringing in Finland in XXXX" -articles in the Yearbook of the Linnut-magazine published by BirdLife Finland. History and administration In Finland, bird ringing was started in 1913 by a private person, Johan Axel Palmén, professor in Zoology at the University of Helsinki. In 1926, the responsibility for bird ringing was moved over to the Zoological Museum of the University of Helsinki, where a Ringing Centre was later established. Nowadays, the Ringing Centre, situated at the Finnish Museum of Natural History (together with the Zoological Museum), employs a regular staff consisting of a head, a secretary and four assistants. In Finland, the catching of birds is governed by both the Nature Protection Act and the Hunting Act (game birds). Every fifth year the Ringing Centre has to submit the applications for the necessary permits for catching and ringing birds to the Ministry of the Environment and to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. These permits are then delegated onwards to the ringers accepted by the Ringing Centre. Ringers Ringing has always been based on voluntary work in our country. The government is only responsible for the wages of the Ringing Centre's staff, as well as for paying for rings and office equipment. Thus the ringer has to pay for literature, climbing gear, protective headgear, safety harnesses, scales, measuring equipment, bird nets and other trapping gear. Only organisations maintaining bird observatories have been able to pay a modest daily fee to ringers who have worked for a long time at the observatories. The number of yearly active ringers has increased from the roughly twenty in the early days to the good five hundred active today. During the first decades, ringing was mostly the privilege of academic people. Nowadays, the civilian professions of the ringers vary a great deal, as every bird-watcher who has passed the exams can become a ringer. The Finnish ringer of today is a competent expert on birds, skilled and dedicated to his work. At the end of 1999 altogether 630 ringers had valid permits. Despite the constantly rising number of women bird-watchers in Finland ringing has remained a strongly masculine hobby in our country, and among active ringers only 2.5% are women. The representative organ of the ringers is the Ringers' Committee elected at the annual Ringers' Meeting. The main tasks of the Ringers' Committee are to help and support the Ringing Centre by giving statements and recommendations (1) on all applications for ringing permits, (2) on "territorial fights" between the ringers and (3) on the venue and program of the Ringers' Meetings. Ringing permits The Finnish Museum of Natural History hands out ringing permits of different types according to the needs of the ringer and the Ringing Centre. The main types of permits are (1) the nestling and (2) the mist-net ringing permits. The prerequisites for obtaining a new ringing permit are that the applicant (1) has turned 18, (2) has learned ringing and bird handling in practice as a trainee to an experienced ringer and has received a certificate after passing his training period, (3) has passed a basic exam, in which the applicant's ability to recognise the regularly nesting species in Finland and the most abundant migrants has been tested, and (4) has presented an acceptable ringing plan. During a trial period of 2-3 years, new nestling permits are restricted to concern the nestlings of only a few species. The permit can be extended later on if the ringer has been working actively and correctly. If the ringer wishes to ring full-grown passerines with mist-nets, he must present a certificate of sufficient training exercises at a bird observatory and pass an exam known as the bird observatory exam. In the latter, the applicant must be able to identify not only all species encountered in Finland, but age and sex on the level of the present knowledge as well (e.g. Svensson 1997, in Finnish). Ringing At first the yearly numbers of ringings increased slowly. It was not until the 1930's that yearly totals of over 10,000 individuals were reached and the total amount of 100,000 ringings was reached in 1939. With the World War II the number of ringings crashed to zero. However, shortly after the war the enthusiasm for ringing grew again at a rapid rate. The grand total of one million ringed birds was exceeded in 1966, three million in 1978 and five in 1988. Altogether, more than 7.6 million birds have been marked with an individual ring in Finland between 1913 and 1999. During the last twenty years 180,000 - 250,000 birds per year have been ringed. Of these, nestlings form some 40%. During recent years, the rather large inter-annual variation in ringing totals with respect to the number of ringings has been due to varying breeding success, varying occurrence of irruptive species, unstable manning situation at bird observatories and other changes in the activity of ringers, whereby old projects have died out and new ones been born (e.g. the EURING Swallow Project). In the statistics for the entire period the ten most numerously ringed species are: Parus major, Ficedula hypoleuca, Phylloscopus trochilus, Regulus regulus, Larus ridibundus, Erithacus rubecula, Acrocephalus schoenobaenus, Parus caeruleus, Carduelis flammea and Larus argentatus. Compared with other countries, Finland has been very active in the ringing of birds of prey, as shown e.g. by the following ringing totals 1913-1999: Aegolius funereus 89,829, Accipiter gentilis 42,686, Falco tinnunculus 41,010, Accipiter nisus 37,111, Strix aluco 33,111, Pandion haliaetus 31,079 and Strix uralensis 30,779. Recoveries In 1999, the Ringing Centre processed a total of 46,682 recovery, recapture and resighting reports of Finnish rings. The grand total of recoveries filed in the database for the years 1913-1999 was 604,843 at the end of 1999. A large part of the recovery database consists of "less interesting" (but still important) recaptures and resightings from the same place within a few days. Thus, when annual statistics are calculated (e.g. for EURING Annual Reports) only those recoveries that fulfil any of the following criteria are included: (1) the bird was found dead (dead nestlings excluded), (2) the bird was alive but had moved at least 10 km from the ringing site or from the previous included retrap place, or (3) the bird was alive at the same site as before, but the time elapsed from the ringing, or from the previous recapture (included already in the statistics) was at least three months. Using the definition above, the number of "interesting" recoveries was 18,543 in 1999 and the cumulative total for 1913-1999 was 309,397. These numbers are more comparable with the ones from other countries not yet able to store all recaptures and resightings. The majority of the recoveries of birds ringed in Finland come from Finland. Of the recoveries defined as "interesting" 21% are reported from abroad, and further, of these foreign ones 94% are from Europe and 4.6% from Africa. Among the most exotic reports of birds ringed in Finland are: Sterna hirundo from Victoria, SE-Australia, Sterna hirundo vel paradisea from Tasmania, Larus fuscus from Cocos Islands, Emberiza aureola from Thailand, Emberiza rustica and Carduelis flammea from China, Stercorarius parasiticus from Brazil, Sterna hirundo vel paradisea from Trinidad, Larus ridibundus resighted in winters 1998-2000 in Texas and Philomachus pugnax from Newfoundland. Database In 1967, the Ringing Centre started to feed into the computer all recoveries (excluding local recaptures) from the start of bird ringing in 1913 in EURING 1963 format. The "comprehensive computer era" started in Finland in 1974. Since then, all new ringings, recaptures (incl. all local ones) and recoveries reported to the Ringing Centre have been fed in Finnish format into the main frame computer of the University of Helsinki, "online". When data is requested the national format will be reduced to e.g. EURING data-exchange-format. Since 1974 all thank-you-letters to the finders and ringers have been written by the computer in ten different languages according to the language used by the receiver. During the last two decades, four different PC-programs have been produced for ringers to allow them to feed in their ringing and recapture data and send it to the Ringing Centre in electronic form. By the end of this year the members of the general public will be able to send their recovery reports through special forms on our home pages. In the beginning our system was based on a set of FORTRAN programs and sequential files on magnetic tapes. Today we rely on ORACLE database system in Unix. The Finnish Ringing Centre has never had much money available. That's why the role of some idealistic persons, amateurs as bird ringers but professionals as computer programmers, has been crucial in developing all our sophisticated computer systems voluntarily without any economical compensation. International ringing projects Finland has tried to participate actively in the international ringing programs launched by the EURING. In the EURING Acrocephalus schoenobaenus project altogether 160,726 Sedge Warblers were ringed by the Finnish ringers in 1984-1995. When EURING Swallow Project was started the annual totals increased from the average level of 1,427 in 1990-6 to 10,853 in the pilot year 1997, 14,743 in 1998 and 24,134 ringed Swallows in 1999. The Constant Effort Sites (CES) monitoring program based on standardised mist-net ringing programme was brought as such from Great Britain to Finland in 1986. Since then, about 30 CES sites have been operating annually. The role of ringers and the Ringing Centre in monitoring and conservation Ringers belong to the qualified core group among the Finnish amateur ornithologists. They participate in many conservation and faunistic programs conducted by various organisations. Ringers play the main role e.g. in all conservation programs of Finnish birds of prey although WWF-Finland has been responsible for the Haliaetus albicilla and Finnish Forest and Park Service for the Aquila chrysaetos, Falco peregrinus and Falco rusticolus programs. Project Pandion and monitoring all the other species of birds of prey have been organised by the Ringing Centre. The conservation program on Pandion haliaetus is a convincing example of the work that ringers do for the Finnish environment. In 1971, the Finnish ringers made the Osprey a target for a special monitoring study, after which almost all Osprey nest sites reported to the Zoological Museum have been checked on a yearly basis. In 1999, 1,301 nest sites were checked, and 865 territories proved to be occupied. In addition to checking nest sites and ringing nestlings, ringers have also collected unhatched eggs and dead nestlings found in the nests for toxicological analyses. As early as in the early days of Project Pandion the lack of tree nest - in addition to environmental pollutants and persecution - was found to be a serious threat to the Osprey population of Finland. The only means of trying to ward off this threat factor brought on by our intense forestry is to build artificial nests, a project to which Osprey ringers have devoted a lot of time and money. Today, nearly half of the known Finnish Osprey pairs nest in artificial nests! The nation-wide general monitoring study on birds of prey, conducted in unison with the Ringing Centre and the Ministry of the Environment, started in 1982. The populations of birds of prey are studied in 10 km x 10 km Raptor Grid squares based on the National Grid and spread over the country. The aim is to find all nests - or at least all occupied territories of the birds of prey in the squares. Since 1986, the monitoring was made more effective by starting to gather all information from the ringers with a Raptor Questionnaire on the nest sites checked and the nests found outside the squares as well. One of the important aims of the project is to get information on nest sites, breeding performance and population trends needed for the protection of birds of prey. In 1999, 124 Raptor Grid squares were monitored and altogether more than 46,000 potential territories of birds of prey were checked and reported on Raptor Questionnaires by Finnish ringers. Priorities of bird ringing in Finland According to conservation ethics and the Finnish law it is not allowed to catch and ring birds merely for fun or the mental therapy of ringers. All ringing must produce sound data for science and/or conservation. How should different species be ranked with regards to ringing priority if resources are restricted? Certainly it is reasonable to use more resources on ringing species which have maximal benefit:cost ratio from a scientific point of view. The following criteria are important for the evaluation: (1) suitability of the species for testing scientific hypotheses, (2) the information content of an individual (the identification possibilities by sex and age), (3) the recovery rate (number recovered per number ringed) and (4) the relationship between the number ringed and the amount of field work required. In addition, some groups should have high priorities because of aspects relating to management: vulnerable species (e.g. birds of prey), game species (waterfowl and gallinaceous birds) and species which are otherwise manipulated by man (gulls and corvids). During the last two decades, population ecology has obtained the highest position on the list of priorities of the Finnish Ringing Centre. For this reason, the ringers have been encouraged both (1) to ring nestlings and (2) to ring and recapture adults at the nest, but of course, without taking any risk of desertion. This has produced large-scale capture-recapture data sets for estimating survival and dispersal of hole-nesting species of owls and passerines, and Bucephala clangula. In 1984, a "constructive restriction " was given to make catching of breeding adults of Ficedula hypoleuca more effective: the ringing of nestlings was allowed only for those ringers who caught at least 90% of the females and 50% of the males of that local population as well. Efficient long-term and large-scale ringing of nestlings of many open-nesting species (e.g. diurnal raptors, some waders and passerines) has produced thousands of individuals, which carry important information for science and management with their rings. Unfortunately, this information is not yet available for science because the breeding adults of these species have not been recaptured on a sufficient scale (excluding Hirundo rustica). Much work is still to be done to develope new, efficient and safe methods for catching adults at the nest of open-nesting species. Because Finland is a country with harsh winters, ringing and recapturing of Finnish winter populations should be effective and produce material for comparisons in survival and movements of populations from more favourable areas. But winter ringing should not take place only at permanent feeding stations, but rather at places where "unnatural" food is used temporarily and only for catching purposes. In Finland, ringing during spring or autumn migration has lower priority than ringing during summer or winter. Ringing migrating birds is only allowed at ten bird observatories and in special projects (e.g. Acro, ESF, EURING Swallow, and irruptive species). We think that it is also very important for migration studies and especially in northern Europe to ring efficiently nestlings and breeding adults, which then can be recaptured along their long migration routes and finally in their wintering grounds. In general, ringing and recovery data have not been used effectively enough. It is important that the staff of a Ringing Centre also participates in data analysis, in addition to everyday routines. The Finnish Ringing Centre has published many papers based on results from ringing, both as "real" scientific contributions and as more simple feedback papers to ringers. Further, during more than ten years already, the Ringing Centre has tried to find time and resources for preparing The recovery atlas of birds ringed in Finland and hopefully this project will be finished in the near future.
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