Here at the ADU (Animal demography Unit) we promote Citizen Science as a very important means of collecting expansive data sets and improving the spread of knowledge throughout southern Africa. Sadly it is not always possible for citizen scientists to take part in the projects offered by SAFRING as not everyone can get a ringing permit (as it requires a lot of training and time) and looking for dead birds to help with recoveries tends to be a little macabre, and quite disturbing when people see us rummaging around a maggot filled corpse to see if there is a ring.
This does not mean that our non-ringing citizen scientists have nothing to offer us here at SAFRING. We have been placing a lot of effort into coordinating the Colour Projects throughout Southern Africa. Colour Projects are an important method for scientists to monitor the short term movements and population dynamics of focus species or genera. Within southern Africa this is done by attaching either a unique sequence of coloured rings on the birds’ legs, or a numbered tag onto the birds’ wing. This method offers less disturbance to the species than retrapping and allows for easy identification within the field by any observer (whether trained or a novice).
Some of the projects currently being undertaken are:
» the Namibian and Limpopo Vulture projects.
» the Swift Tern project with 500 colour ringed juveniles dispersing from Robben Island each year.
» a demographic study of Black Sparrowhawks across the Cape Peninsula.
» the Martial Eagle project running in The Kruger National Park.
» and various African Oystercatcher projects running across the entire coastline (1, 2, 3).
We also receive a number of foreign sightings such as albatross from oceanic islands and the various tern species visiting from Europe (eg. Lesser Crested Tern).
When a colour ring is seen it is very important that the correct data is collected and sent to us.
For every sighting we need the following information:
So as a request to all our passionate, dedicated and selfless citizen scientists out there helping on the various ADU projects; please keep an additional eye out for any colour ringed/ tagged birds and report them to us at SAFRING through our "Found a Colour Ring" page. Furthermore, to our colour project coordinators, please ensure your project details are up to date and that all colour ring projects are in our system as an overlap between any of the colour sequences or numbers would jeopardise all the studies involved as uncertainty would arise for each sighting.
