ajohn

I am pleased that these photos of ringed birds are being posted. Thank you.

The ring number on this bird ends with a 7. This is the case for three Little Buntings ringed this winter (out of a total of 18 ringed). If you have any photos of the number before this, I could probably determine the individual involved (of course, it is a matter of luck as to which part of the ring is visible!)

In most years knowing this last number would probably be enough to guess at an individual ID, but it happens that this winter we have ringed higher numbers of Little Bunting than usual.

ajohn

Thanks Kitty. That photo is surprisingly useful!
After some consideration of whether this may actually be a foreign-ringed bird, we have concluded that the ring is in fact from Hong Kong. The new photo appears to show that the number ends with ...77
This leaves only one option: this bird is T978077, which was ringed at Mai Po (Gei Wai 8) on 27th February 2010.

Interestingly, there have only been two Little Bunting retrapped in Hong Kong (out of 310 ringed) so this resighting adds some interesting data to the dataset.