I get very excited when I see a flock of birds.

I always have done. Since I was a small boy I have always wondered what kind of birds they are and where they come from; I still do today.

Only these days there's a decent chance you may actually find out if you look closely enough. There are two main reasons for this: the increase in biological recording techniques such as ringing, tracking and wing-tagging, and huge recent advances in photographic equipment such as auto-focusing digital DSLRs and lenses. Better telescopes and optics have helped too, as has the general increase of interest in birds and wildlife by the general public.

A ringed black headed gull photographed in Caernarfon - a Norwegian male ringed as a chick in 2010 in Stavanger, 565 miles away

How's it done?

In the UK (and many other countries) a small metal ring is placed on one of the legs. They come in a variety of sizes from tiny little things (for wrens, firecrests, etc) which are very difficult to handle with big sausage-fingers, to huge bracelets (swans, geese, etc). These type of rings are mainly for recoveries - birds that have either been found dead or unwell, although if you have a long enough lens and patience of even longer proportions, with enough time and from various angles, you may be able to identify all the digits on these BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) rings.

A mute swan with a metal ring on the left leg photographed on the Menai Straits - ZZ86... but what's the rest of the digits?

This is where colour rings come in. Here is the exact same swan, the exact same photograph in fact, showing all of the bird without cropping the picture.

Not only did this swan have a BTO ring, it had a colour ring too on the other leg - Blue 7FCS. Now things get a whole lot easier.

These are ID rings which are usually placed (but not always) at the same time as the BTO rings, usually when the bird is a chick in the nest or caught in the wild as an adult in nets. We tend to call these type of rings, "Darvic rings" in the UK, after the type of hard-wearing plastic they are made of, although strictly speaking, not all of these rings are actual darvic.

Colour Ring Projects

These colour rings are species specific - there will be a project somewhere run by one individual, or a small team of people, that coordinate the colour ringing scheme for a particular species. Roy Dennis for example coordinates all the Darvic ringing for all ospreys in the UK.

Ospreys: BTO left leg, Darvic right leg - it's the other way around in Scotland

There's another variant of this colour ringing scheme too - a colour-coded system where no numbers or letters are used. Here a series of leg rings are placed, one on top of each other, in a specific sequence, usually on both legs. Another variant is where two Darvic rings are used with characters on them - like this brent goose photographed just a couple of weeks ago on Christmas Day 2016 at Foryd Bay near Caernarfon.

It turned out that this light-bellied brent goose was ringed as a six-year-old adult just outside the Cadburys chocolate factory in Dublin in February 2014!

Since then he has been an annual visitor to Foryd Bay as well as to a couple sites in Northern Ireland.

So as we now know, these types of colour ringing systems are devised for when the bird is very much alive. If you have a decent camera or telescope/binoculars, you can very often read these rings 'in the field'. Colour ringing has greatly improved our understanding of bird ecology and movements for the best part of 50 years and has helped their conservation enourmously.

If you find a ringed bird and can read or decipher it, just google that species, "ringing system for oystercatchers" for example - you usually get to the right people fairly quickly. If you can't find the right project - email us and we'll try and help.

And you don't need to be next to an estuary or half way up a tree to find ringed birds - here's one I photographed in 2015 - in the middle of London!

A Belgian lesser black-backed gull near Westminster bridge, aged just four months

Waxwings

This week we have seen an 'irruption' of waxwings to Machynlleth, as well as many other parts of the UK. European waxwings (also called Bohemian waxwings - a different species to cedar waxwings in the US) are beautiful starling-sized birds that fly over from their native Scandinavia each winter. The intensity of waxwing irruptions vary greatly from year to year, mainly governed by food availability in their home countries. This winter seems to be a particularly good irruption year, helped also by the recent strong easterly winds.

Just outside the Machynlleth library on Wednesday this week

This poor mistle thrush was going bananas, trying to fend off the waxwings who were eating all his/her berries - a very common sight during waxwing irruptions.

From an initial flock of around 16 on Wednesday, they have doubled to around 30 strong by today, but one bird stands out - he is colour-coded with leg rings. Cue great excitement!

This waxwing has three colour rings on his left leg: yellow-over-green-over-orange. He has a BTO ring on his right leg plus one additional white ring. He is a young male - a 2016 bird, but he wasn't ringed in his native Scandinavian forest nest as a chick, he was ringed on the 27th of November - in Scotland!

The Grampian Ringing Group have had a great waxwing year, ringing several hundred birds; our bird is one of these. He was photographed five days before I snapped him on the north Wales coast in the B&Q car park, Llandudno.

Same bird - photographed by Neil Alderson in Llandudno on 30th December in a flock of 30-40 birds

So here is what we know of this bird's movements so far:

Have you had any waxwings near you? Look out near supermarkets and shops, especially around car parks where there are lots of rowan or other trees still with berries on.

And it's not only waxwings that have colour rings - practically every bird species you can think of are or have been part of a colour ring project during the last 10 years. Next time you see a flock of birds - take a closer look, 2017 could well be the year you find your first ringed bird and add to the knowledge base of that species' ecology.

Happy New Year to you all.

A glossy ibis photographed five miles south of DOP in 2010 - a 2007 bird ringed in Andalusia, Spain

UPDATE 27th January 2017

We've just received yet another re-sighting of the waxwing - by the Grouse Inn, Peak District National Park, just south of Sheffield.