From Africa

Today we did one of our monthly bird ringing mornings at Beeston. It was pretty slow going, but this bird - a male Whitethroat, Sylvia communis - provided the highlight.

We first caught it last summer, when it was already at least one year old. Since we last saw it, this little warbler which weighs about 16g (half an ounce) has flown across the sea, down through Europe and over the Sahara desert - and back again. It's humbling to think of the things it's seen and done.

If you haven't heard about bird ringing before, here's a brief explanation. By catching wild birds and fitting lightweight, uniquely-numbered metal rings around their legs, we can learn more about their behaviour and biology. For example, we can find out how long they live, where they fly to and how the population as a whole is doing.

PS I forgot to mention about how we catch the birds. There are various ways but we use the most common one, mist-netting. A very fine mesh is stretched between poles. It's so fine (and mist-like...) that the birds can't see it and fly into it.

We check the nets regularly and carefully extract any birds we find. Doing this takes years of training and you need to have a licence to do it. I'm a trainee part-way through this long - and fascinating - process.

PPS As well as putting a ring on the bird's leg, we record information such as age, sex (if we can tell - it depends on the species), wing length (as a measure of how big the bird is), weight and what condition it's in (by scoring its amount of fat and muscle).

I'm sure there will be some more ringing photos in future blips.