Interruption to pictures

The ringing of the chicks happened today from (17:47 to 18:45 local time), and there was an interruption to the service which normally lets you see and hear the birds while it took place. This meant the pictures were frozen for an hour or so.

Update: Ringing was successfully completed by 18:45 (with just one abseil rope getting a bit stuck for a while). The Streamdays image stream has now returned, though we still only have audio on the live stream. The parent bird returned to the nest platform immediately the ringers had left, which is what we would have expected.

So, what have we got? Well, a phone call from the tower has just reported that Ant and Martin (our two licenced ringers) believe we have three male peregrine chicks and one female.

As well as making the ringers feel less "under the spotlight", we were concerned that someone watching the web cams may not be aware that ringing was taking place (human arms and legs would suddenly appear at the platform) and could think there was an attempt to steal the chicks and panic and ring the police (though we have already given notice to Derbyshire police that ringing would be taking place today).

Now that ringing is complete we'll let you know in more detail how it went, and also post photos of the chicks as soon as we can....and at least the dangling prey item obscuring the view has been removed!

The photo here shows one of the two 2007 chicks with its numbered colour ring. It also had a small metal ring on the more distant leg. The colour ring is big enough to read the number through a telescope but loose on the leg and in no way a hindrance to the bird. It means that, should this bird perch somewhere where someone can see the ring and read the number, eg on a building in say Nottingham, we will know where our Derby offspring are. Even if they can only see the (unique) colour, we will know it was a Derby-bred bird (peregrines colour ringed elsewhere have a different colour).


The metal ring is a standard ring which simply states 'contact Brit. Museum' and has a unique number such that if the bird is found injured or dead or is recaptured, its exact identity and origin will be known.


Colour rings do fall off sometimes, the colour fades and the number becomes difficult to read, so both rings are essential to maximise the information we can get back from these chicks in the future.


The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) organises and supervises the ringing of wild birds in the UK. See their website for more about bird ringing in general. They are fully aware of what we do at Derby.