Abberton Reservoir is a well-known birding site in the county of Essex, Southeast England, but one that I had never visited before last week. I had a really great time at this nice spot, with a very good selection of species and the two causeways across the reservoir were great spots to stand and photograph waterbirds in flight as they flew across from one part of the water body to another. In this way I got nice shots of a variety of species of ducks, Little and Great Egrets as well as numerous Great Cormorants. It wasn’t until I got home and looked at my photographs that I noticed that I had caught a Cormorant that had a colour ring on its left leg. The question was though, could I read the code on the ring so that I could report it?

For the ring to be readable requires a bit of luck in these situations, but as I took a series of around eight photos it turned out that there was one which showed the colour ring quite clearly and it seemed that the ring had a three letter code in black print on the orange background.

Zooming in on the ring I could clearly see that the first two letters were C and R with the third looking like H. Using this information I was able to use the website the website European Colour Ring Birding I was able to work out which ringing programme was responsible for this particular bird. This turned out to be the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and so I emailed them with the information and asked if they could let me know where this bird was originally ringed.

The information I received in reply, from the BTO was interesting. This bird was ringed as a chick in the nest on 5th May 2012 at Abberton Reservoir, Essex! My recovery is the first one with a gap of 3050 days and to discover that this bird has not gone anywhere was interesting. We think of birds being able to fly vast distances (which they can) but often they don’t go far if they have a good source of food and this Cormorant seems quite happy at Abberton Reservoir.

I encourage other birders to report colour ringed birds as I have done in other blog posts:

• Colour Ringed Great Black-backed Gull | British Birding
• Reporting a ringed Mediterranean Gull
• Ringed Black-headed Gull – British Birding
• A Ringed Herring Gull – British Birding
• Reporting Ringed Birds – British Birding