Why ring birds?

In 1763 Johann Leonard Frisch reported that he had tied coloured threads around the legs of Swallows in order to find out if they really spent the winter on the bottom of lakes. If that was the case the colour of the threads would vanish during winter. When the Swallows returned in spring the colour was unchanged and he concluded that they must have spent the winter in warmer countries, he suggested Italy.

There are stories of markings of birds as far back as 200 BC. From this time it is told that Quintus Fabius Pictor during the second Punic War used marked Swallows to send information to a besieged city. A Swallow, taken from a nest in the city, had a thread with knots tied around its leg, the number of knots indicating the number of days until help should arrive.

An early example of ringing was carried out by Naumann in Germany who, in 1820, reported ringing Buzzards with copper rings engraved with his address, time and place of ringing. The purpose was to study changes in the plumage of the birds but unfortunately only the rings, and not the entire birds, were returned to him and since his purpose could not, then, be fulfilled he abandoned the ringing project. Obviously, he did not consider studying the movements of the birds.

Among falconers, for example, it has been common to mark birds with the name of the owner but it was the Danish schoolteacher Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen who started the large-scale, systematic and scientific bird ringing. During the time period 1888-1919, Mortensen worked as a teacher in Viborg, Jutland. On 5 June 1899 he ringed the first Starling with an aluminium ring engraved “Viborg 1". During the first year he ringed 165 Starlings and during the following year another 410. In the autumn of 1899 he made several announcements, in ornithological journals throughout Europe, that he wanted to receive information if any of the ringed birds were found.

Mortensen soon expanded his ringing activity and up to and including the year 1920 he had ringed more than 5 000 birds of 33 species and received almost 400 recoveries. A recovery of a Teal on 12 April 1908 at Hederviken, 40 km north of Stockholm, is probably the first recovery of a ringed bird in Sweden. In the middle of the 1970s, though, a White Stork that had been shot at Ottenby, Öland, in 1907 or 1908 was reported. It had carried a ring engraved MORTENSEN VIBORG 12 and had been ringed as a nestling on Jutland in 1905.

Mortensen's successful ringing of wild birds resulted in a break-through for ringing as a method and it quickly spread to other countries. In 1901 Johanness Thienemann started the first bird observatory in the world, Vogelwarte Rossitten, at Kurische Nehrung/Courish Spit in what was then East Prussia and in 1903 he started bird ringing of Crows. Later on, other bird species were ringed as well and up to the World War II close to 1 million birds had been ringed at the bird observatory. At the same location, ringing activity was resumed after the war in 1956 at the Russian bird observatory Rybachy.

Ringing activity started in Great Britain in 1904, in Hungary in 1908, and in North America and Portugal in 1909. In the Nordic countries ringing started in Sweden in 1911, in Finland in 1913, in Norway in 1914 and in Iceland in 1921. Today, national ringing schemes are widely spread and exist not only in Europe, North America and Australia but also in some countries in South America, Africa and Asia.