The following information has been provided to me by Rob Turner, retired Bird Recorder for Wiltshire and a senior member of the West Wilts Group and Phil Deacon, Wiltshire Ornithological Society committee member and senior member of the North Wilts Group.
Rob sent me the following: “Having been intrigued by Jonny’s record, I thought I’d have a quick trawl through the literature and the web.
The extreme dates for Wiltshire are 5 at Devizes 21 August 2018 and a single at Fyfield, 21 May 1978. (Hobby 48 , Wilts Bird Report 2021 p79.)
The ‘Birds of Wiltshire’ p575, final paragraph records a probable but unconfirmed breeding record at Coate Water area sometime between 1868-77. It does say: ‘Although no other British nesting records are known before the 1920’s the now regular population in Scotland and the odd instances of breeding in English Counties in the last 3 decades of the 20th century lends support to the account.’
Current BTO estimates are 50-100 pairs mostly restricted to Scottish Highlands and as far north as Shetland and a few as far south as Kent. As always with extreme records of migrants its always difficult to surmise which way the bird is going, is it a late departure of a wintering bird or an early arrival of a failed breeder!”
Phil noted: Nearest ringing record I have is one at Potterne on 13 May 1986. This bird was ringed at Spurn Point on the 11th October 1985. We get very few Redwing retraps: of our catch of just under 3,500 Redwing, there have only been seven retraps, but four of them were retrapped in the same winter after ringing. Only one of our records is from a bird retrapped at the same site in a subsequent winter. This was RL61400: ringed in Ravensroost Wood on the 28th December 2016 and retrapped at the same site, in the same net, on the 6th January 2018.
He also noted about Jonny’s photo of the bird: “An outstanding record, I have seen the photo, no CP or BP so a non-breeder, may not have been fit enough for the return migration.”
Andrew Harris, an experienced ringer from Kent, did remark upon the body weight of the bird: considerably more than the normal ranges for the species. The BTO’s BirdFacts has the weight range as being 55g to 84g. Our own records have a dozen Redwing weighing in at 80+g but this is the first with a weight of over 90g. Jonny has checked his records from the session and is 100% confident that the weight entered is accurate. It wasn’t challenged by the online data entry system, which has built-in extreme parameters. If it falls outside of the ranges it prompts you to confirm the value, with a comment to justify it. It didn’t do that because, if it had, the comment would be attached to the record.
I have to mention that Jonny also has another Redwing record: the longest known movement of a Redwing retrapped in the UK. On the 2nd November 2022 he retrapped a juvenile Redwing that had been ringed in the nest at a place called Rautalampi, Pohjois-Savo, Kuopio, Finland. It had flown 2,126km to land at a farm just outside Chippenham! There are longer movements of birds ringed in the UK and recovered elsewhere (usually shot by some ne’er-do-well with no respect for wildlife).
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 