Bird ringing

There's nothing there.

And, and so it's like, you know, the, the, the, the strategy and the, and the pressure that, that Cohen and others have, have done i- is teaching us a lot, but people also don't call in their bird bands anymore, which blew my mind.

I wonder why.

Because they don't want people to know that they-

And I banded birds under him for five years.

So when I was about to graduate from Millbrook School and go to Yale, Frank said, Oak, would you like to have your own bird banding permit? And I said, sure.

So he wrote a glowing letter to the bird banding office, and I got my own permit.

Boy, that's the perfect mentor.

I

bet he was thrilled that you were interested in bird banding.

He was a great mentor, though.

I just learned so much from him.

I can see the shapes of trees looming against the sky, which is now streaked with pink, and there's a trickle of a robin's song just filtering through the trees, but I'm not alone here.

For this week's Open Country, I've come out with a bird ringing group from the village of Whitwell in Northeast Derbyshire because I'd like to find out more about just how relevant bird ringing is these days, but also to hear the story of this rather remarkable group of people whose record of monitoring birds on their local patch goes back decades.

And with me, I'm pleased to say, is an ornithologist you'll know very well if you're a fan of Springwatch, Jack Badhams.

Jack, lovely to see you at this hour of the morning.

I was m- obsessed with birds since before I can remember, and the idea that I could get closer to them, that I could learn a whole different way of learning about them, uh, and that I could contribute scientifically to our understanding of them is really what drew me to ringing.

And then the more I got involved and the more I learnt about the people that had sort of come before, the more fascinating I found the whole thing.

A lot of people get interested in watching birds, but where did the bird ringing come in?

Hmm, so that was, my grandma actually went to the local village Whitwell Wood Natural History Group talk, uh, and she saw a talk, uh, that was given by Eleanor, who you heard earlier, who was a bird ringer in this area and who was talking about the bird ringing activities that she did.

I'm gonna say no, but here's the story.

We went to Canada years ago, and one evening we actually shot two banded birds.

And, uh, one of those banded birds I tag-teamed with somebody, um, and I-

You lost the card flip

... ended up with that bird.

Yep.

Then the exact same thing happened again years later when we went down to the coast on a goose hunt.

Uh, we shot two banded birds in one hunt then as well, and I actually did get a band out of that.