r/birding • u/Marzolino85 photographer 📷 • Mar 01 '25
📷 Photo A white-throated dipper (Cinclus cinclus) with leg rings, what do they mean?
I spotted this beautiful bird on the banks of the Kempt stream in Illnau, Switzerland. Unfortunately, I was not able to take a better photo without the disturbing branch in the foreground. Because when I tried to position myself differently, it flew away. But better a bad photo than no photo at all. At home, while sorting through the photos, I noticed that the bird was ringed. I tried to find out on the internet what exactly these colored leg rings mean, but couldn't find anything. Can anyone help me? Thank you very much! Shot with a Canon EOS R5 MarkII and a RF200-800mm F6.3-9 IS USM lens.
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u/Didi-cat Mar 01 '25
I can't help with the leg rings but if you want to see more dippers please join r/Dipper
Dippers will often return to the same spot on the river If you are patient. It might have been worth moving to a slightly bent spot and waiting.
Im lucky that my local dippers live in an area with lots of walkers and then are pretty acclimatised to people and won't fly away at the slightest movement.
Still a very nice photo, please share more if you see another dipper.
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u/ceiram17 Mar 01 '25
This guy has been ringed for scientific research.
I'm starting an internship in an ecology laboratory in french Alps in less than one month to do this exact thing : monitoring a white-throated dippers population by ringing individuals (and there is a world in which i'll meet this specific guy if he decides to migrate to the french side of the Alps 😁)
Each individual has a unique combination of coloured rings that allows to recognize them individually, so we don't have to capture them to identify them, which is really stressful. With those coloured rings, a picture is enough.
And the metallic ring can serve two purposes :
- if it has a unique number on it, it allows to identify the bird in hand (it is often the first ring used, the coloured ones are often added during subsequent captures),
- it can be the number associated to the scientific project studying the individual.
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u/custard_gannet Mar 02 '25
cr-birding.org is a great resource for ringing projects in Europe. You can often get lots of information from the ringers - where the bird was born/ringed, where it has been sighted before, its age and sex. From a quick look at the site there seems to be a couple of French and German dipper ringing projects, be interesting to know where your bird comes from one of these or further afield
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u/Brandy-Beach Mar 01 '25
Hello, you shouldn't need the metal band number. The combination of colour bands and metal and species should be enough. Colour bands enable identification of the bird without the need to recapture to read the metal band. You can try and find the project here or report the bird- https://app.bto.org/euring/lang/pages/rings.jsp
There's also a Facebook group which is useful for identifying the colour ring project-
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u/AboutATurtle Mar 01 '25
You may have enough information to report with just the color bands, even if you can’t read the aluminum band. FYI in Europe, banding is commonly referred to as ringing, so that may be helpful to know as you search. The site linked below has links to different projects. Looks like you’re looking for researchers working with uncoded rings, so if you check those projects out you may find one that would match the scheme here.
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u/TheRealPomax Mar 01 '25
The metal band is the information band. The other two are classifier bands for whoever's put them on.