Birds of Saudi Arabia

Showing posts with label Bahrain - Red-spotted Bluethroat (svecica). Show all posts

13 November 2013

Re-trapped Red-spotted Bluethroat - Alba Marsh (Bahrain)

An early morning trip to Bahrain to go ringing proved quite successful for us with 22 birds caught of eight species. Quite a few re-traps were processes all of which had been ringed at the same site by us. The most interesting one was an adult male Red-spotted Bluethroat that was originally caught in November 2012 and again in January 2013 showing the bird was using Alba Marsh as a wintering site. The fact we then re-caught the bird in November 2013 shows it is probably going to use the same site to winter again after having moved off north to breed. Bluethroats are difficult to assign to race unless an adult male is seen or caught, but this one looks like a svecica that breed in Scandinavia and north Asia as well as north-west North America and Canada and winter in southern Europe, North and North tropical Africa, Arabia and south and east Asia.

Red-spotted Bluethroat - adult male

Red-spotted Bluethroat - first year male

We also re-caught a Common Kingfisher that we had caught originally at the same site a few weeks earlier suggesting this bird is also going to use the site as a wintering location. Other re-traps were Clamorous Reed Warblers that are resident at the site. A few Graceful Prinias were also caught, a species we have not caught for almost a year. They are really beautiful as well as small birds weighing only 6-7 grams and are resident at the marsh.

Common Kingfisher

Common Chiffchaff

European Reed Warbler

Graceful Prinia

Water Pipit

07 November 2012

First Bluethroats of the autumn – Ringing at Alba Marsh (Bahrain)

Nicole and I went ringing again at Alba Marsh on Friday morning. A 04:30 hrs start allowed us to get to the site just before daylight and set the nets up. Nicole has now got her own nets, three 18 metre and two 12 metre nets and we were going to try to put all five up, however, after setting two nets in the best positions we had already caught a few birds so after setting the third net we began processing the caught ones. As it turned out we caught steadily all morning and ended up with 19 birds so never did set the other two nets. We caught mainly Clamorous Reed Warblers (12 birds including three re-traps all ringed at the same site late last year or this year), but we also caught a flava Yellow Wagtail, two Red-spotted Bluethroats (one race svecica) which were the first returning birds of the autumn and four Common Chiffchaffs. There were quite a few Water Pipits present, but we failed to catch any as we never got the time to set a net in their favourite place. As Nicole has got her own nets now, we returned Brendan’s nets to Abdulla to give back to Brendan when he sees him in a few days’ time in Ireland. It was really great of Brendan to let us borrow some of his nets when he returned to Ireland or we would not have been able to continue ringing until this week. It was also good to see Abdulla again after such a long time and we have arranged to try to meet him on the weeks we go ringing on Friday, as his advice and help are invaluable to us. Abdulla has not been catching a great deal of birds over the autumn but has managed to catch a few good ones for Bahrain including Wryneck, Western Marsh Harrier, Long-legged Buzzard and Hobby.