Rachel goes swallow catching

At the beginning of December I got the chance to go ringing swallows with a Dutch guy called Bennie. He comes out to Africa every year to catch and ring European Barn Swallows who are on their winter migration – nice work if you can get it! He is particularly interested in birds that have European rings on already – we caught one from Poland – which tells him where the birds have come from. Apparently most of the swallows that over winter in Zambia are Eastern European birds, swallows from the UK and Holland tend to go down the west coast of Africa and end up in South Africa. We also caught a few with rings on from last year which shows that the same birds come back to the same winter quarters each year.

We would head out on the evenings and set up our mist nets close to reed beds where the swallows roost. We then put on a little tape of swallows talking and sat back and waited for them to come in. And just about on dusk they would. They would flock above our heads in groups numbering over 1000 at times which was really quite a sight. Then as they swooped down for the reeds in to the nets they’d go. We would catch on average 150-200 birds each evening! Luckily Bennie is quite the experienced ringer so he could whip them out, put a ring on them and off they’d go, me I took a little longer so I’d maybe only ring about 30 a night. But we’d have them all out in about 2hrs and then take 10 adult birds and 10 juvenile birds home with us to do more detailed measurements on in the morning.

First thing in the morning we’d process the swallows from the previous evening, measuring their wing and tail lengths, scoring them on fat, muscle and speed of moult, weighing them, to get an overall idea of body condition. Bennie’s past work has been investigating whether body condition (and thus survival) of individuals is affected by roost size so he will use this years’ data to compare it with results of previous years.

We also went out early one morning with our nets to see what other birds we could catch. Nearly every bird was a new one for me! We had waxbills, bulbuls, weavers, shrikes, warblers (one of which, the river warbler, Bennie was very excited to ring as he’d never seen that species in Zambia before…I then promptly let it escape from the bag before he had a chance to…thankfully he was very good about it….I think….). We even caught a Lizzard Buzzard that had seen the little birds caught in the net and gone after one as a meal. But the strangest thing we caught was a cattle egret which had followed a herd of cows right into the nets! Luckily we arrived just in time to chase all the cows off before they made a real mess.