Saving the house sparrow
A NATURALIST and qualified bird ringer has set up a project to monitor the wellbeing of house sparrows in Shetland.
Once one of the most common birds in the UK, the house sparrow is now on the Red List of conservation concern and has disappeared from many parts of the country.
Locally the population appears to still be healthy, one of the reasons Graham Uney wants to start the Shetland House Sparrow Project now.
“I’ve seen the house sparrow vanish from many parts of Britain, and when I moved to Shetland and found good numbers here, I knew that studying this healthy population could give us some answers as to what’s gone wrong elsewhere.
“Watching and monitoring sparrow movements and survival might even reduce the risk of them becoming extinct in Shetland in the future,” he said.
Ringing birds and monitoring their progress is one way to establish what percentage of the population survives from one year to the next.
In order to have to catch the birds only once, Uney is using a colour ring with a code that can be identified in the field by an observer using binoculars.
He said: “Anybody with sparrows in their garden can help with the project just by having a look every now and again and reporting to the project if they see a bird with a coloured ring.
“Each colour ring has a two digit code. The code, the colour of the ring, and the colour of the lettering are all important to identify the bird.
“At present all birds we catch have a black ring, with white lettering, so all we need to know is the actual code.
“This can be either numbers, letters, or a combination. If you see a colour-ringed bird and can read the code, please let us know where and when, and the code itself.”
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At present birds are only being colour-ringed in Skeld where Uney lives, but he hopes the project will expand as other Shetland bird ringers get involved.
He can be contacted via email shetlandsparrows@gmail.com or telephone 01595 860399. Uney also keeps progress on the project up to date online at http://shetlandsparrows.blogspot.co.uk/
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