The Lincolnshire Bird Club

Canadian Turnstone holidays in Cleethorpes!

Information from Bill Brooking

Species Information: Turnstone

Location Information: Cleethorpes Beach

Bird Information: I have just reiceved back information on a coloured ringed turnstone seen on cleethorpes beach november 12th 2009. Left leg tibia white flag;tarsus light blue or grey,right leg tarsus yellow over yellow.It was ringed at Alert Ellesmere island Canada in summer 2001 or 2002. Unfortunately it has lost a ring on its left leg tibia so the ringer could not say for definate which bird it was!

_________________
-----------------------------------------------------
Andrew Chick
Website: http://www.forktail.co.uk/

Which is found on google maps at http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&sourc ... 8&t=h&z=13

Andrew

_________________
-----------------------------------------------------
Andrew Chick
Website: http://www.forktail.co.uk/

This individual has returned for at least it's third winter to Cleethorpes, showing how site faithful this species can be.
Alert is the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world, being only 508 miles from the North Pole.


Record shot below taken 17/12/08 (the white flag isn't visible here but the four colour rings are)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_tGC5Alctj9I/S ... N3778a.jpg

regards

Chris

thought it was the same bird as was observed by several people in the leisure ctr area the year before,

terry whalin

Does anyone have full details for this bird, as I don't think this record (or records) has ever made it to the BTO? If anyone has dates of sightings then that'd be fine. Although we don't have the full ring details we might be able to store the record in some way. We only have records of 27 Canadian Turnstone in Britain so this is an excellent record we don't want to lose!

Mark Grantham
BTO Ringing Scheme

mark see ringing details reports by chris atkin myself stuart brittans comments dated jan 30th 2008 dec 18 2008 also around those dates in the sightings there should be references to this bird,
terry whalin

I've managed to gather a few more details together now, so see the summary (and hilarious photo) on the ringing blog here:
http://btoringing.blogspot.com/2009/12/ ... orpes.html

Mark G

Only just seen the last couple of postings.

Here's the full details that have recently been sent to Bill & copied to myself from Dr Guy Morrison in Canada :

Thank you very much for your email - very interesting, as I was half way through an email to you last night (which I was going to finish this morning) saying I had come to the same conclusion!! I had looked up other records of sightings of our turnstones in the UK, and noticed that the bird you saw was very likely one that had been seen previously at Cleesthorpe but has now lost one of its bands. As you point out, the bird was originally Fw,BB:m,YY - i.e., blue over blue on the lower left, and it was first seen at Cleesthorpe on 4 December 2007. The date in my previous correspondence with Chris Atkin, who reported the bird, was 4 Dec 07 rather than 5 Dec 07 - there were subsequent sightings on 1 Jan 08, as you mention, and I received another report of the bird on 23 Nov 08. Chris was able to send some photos of the bird, and the blue bands looked as though they were most likely old dark blue ones (rather than fresh light blue ones), which can appear grey or a washed-out blue, which would fit the observation of your bird and the conclusions you reached! This is a very nice record, as it now looks as though the bird probably spent the winters of 07-08, 08-09, and now 09-10 at Cleesthorpe.
The banding details of the bird were as follows:

Ruddy Turnstone

Bands: upper left - white flag; lower left - dark blue over dark

blue: upper right - metal; lower right - yellow over yellow

Metal band: 1313-59558

Ad Female

Banded: Alert, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada 82 30N 62 20W

Date: 28 July 2001

The bird was caught while preparing for migration after breeding - it had a brood patch which was refeathering and weighed 139 grams when caught.

We have had a fair number of our turnstones seen around the UK. A quick look through the records indicates about 30 or so sightings, with a few more band recoveries. The sightings range from Cornwall to Scotland, and there have been a number on the Orkney Islands (4) and Shetland Islands (2). Sightings are also numerous on the continent - Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain (and Canary Islands!), with the farthest south bird seen in Namibia. I thought the latter might have been an "overshoot", but it turned up on the same beach each winter for a number of years!

Thanks very much again for reporting the sighting and for the really useful efforts in sorting out the colour of the rings and the identity of the bird - when a bird loses a colour ring, it is nice to know when - makes identification a little easier in the future. Hope to keep in touch, and any other news of the bird would, of course, be most welcome.