Harrier Banding 5 June and some other Harrier news.

 On Wednesday my 2 brothers and I had a Harrier banding session in the Lakeside area. Although it was a relatively short session it was pretty successful. We caught 10 new birds and made 5 recaptures of birds already banded. Two birds were caught twice and perhaps are slow learners. The number of new birds was a big surprise as this area has been regularly trapped over the last few years. Although most of them were young birds, there were also several older ones.

An old male caught for the first time with grey primary's

And the pale-yellow eye of an old bird

I think it probable that there has been an influx of birds into the area in the last few weeks. The oldest recap was banded 700 days ago on our second banding session.

As it was 700 days ago with the brown eye of a young bird

Now it has the pale-yellow eye of an older girl.

A Distant Recovery

I received an e-mail from the Banding Office a week or so ago reporting the recovery of one of our banded Harriers. It was found dead on the side of a road near Hastings on the East Coast of the North Island. Initially my thoughts were one of almost disbelief as almost all our recoveries are within 5km of the banding site with the furthest being 14km. This one is 541 km in a straight line and no doubt the bird flew a lot further. It also had to cover some pretty rugged country and cross Cook Strait. It had been banded on 19 April 24 just 38 days before its death. I estimate that it had averaged about 15 km a day from banding to its demise.

The itinerant bird at banding was a young male.

I also recently received a photo of a banded bird asking if it was one of ours. It obviously wasn't as our colour bands are White on Red this one was Black on White. It bad been found near Cheviot in North Canterbury and I have discovered it had been banded in Molesworth.

The Molesworth bird with its Black on White band.