Mount Moreland

Barn Swallows First Recapture

Barn Swallows News: 

Notification of the first ever recapture of a barn swallow from Mt Moreland, KZN South Africa has just been received.

Today, 3 May, 2010, the Lake Victoria Conservancy’s sponsored ringer, Andrew Pickles, received an email from SAFRING, South Africa’s national bird ringing data centre, that a barn swallow ringed by him at the Mt Moreland Roost, ring number AM94463, on Friday 12 December 2008 has been found dead in Ukraine. It was found on 1 May 2010 by a Ukrainian teacher, Victor, at a town called Kirovograd just south of Chenobyl. This is a distance 8691 kilometres from Mt Moreland. It is 505 days since it was ringed in 2008 when it was logged as a juvenile male weighing 20grams. This means in all likelihood that it has revisited Mt Moreland since it was ringed and was in the process of returning home to breed.

This recapture is exciting in many ways. Not only is swallow, AM94463, the first swallow from the Mt Moreland Roost to be recaptured but records show it was ringed only the day before the Pickles  team caught  the very first ringed swallow ever captured at Mt Moreland. That swallow 136952V was captured on Saturday 13 December, 2008 – the same weekend.  It was 6 month old, weighed 17grams and came 10 327 kilometres  from  Nilsia in Finland. Thanks to Birdlife International it made news around the World.

These two records give rise to an interesting question…was this latest swallow, AM94463, actually from the Ukraine or was it on its way to Finland?  It is the migration season and Finland still awaits its swallows so the answer could be either.

Yet a further ‘date’ coincidence is that swallow AM94463 was found on the day, May 1^st, that Durban’s new greenfields KingShakaInternationalAirport, only 2.6 kilometres north of the Mt Moreland Roost, opened. Airports Company South Africa has, working with the Lake Victoria Conservancy and BirdlifeSA, put in various safeguards to protect the millions of barn swallows when they return to their roost in October 2010. It is hoped these work and the swallows will continue to use the Mt Moreland Roost, the largest in South Africa, throughout the coming season from October 2010 to April 2011. Details of the Conservancy’s efforts to protect the swallows in face the new airport can be followed on the website www.barnswallow.co.za