Hi Matthew
Brilliant - that makes sense. The bird is called uBgr (which stands for the Ultramarine anodised metal band, the large Blue plastic band, and the epoxied Green-Red band on the left leg (this one actually has two colours).
She started her life on the territory in the ANBG that contains the rockery and adjacent lawn, and the northern section of the big Acacia bed which runs between the rockery and the main Eucalypt lawn. She was part of a clutch of three that fledged on 20 November
2016. She disappeared from our census on 13 January 2017, and would have made her way over Black Mountain to the bushland. She probably spent her first winter there in a foreign group, from which she would have gained a breeding vacancy at the start of the
2017/2018 breeding season. Hence she is just emerging from her first breeding season. Like most fairy-wrens, she was the product of infidelity from her mother (MrwO), who spurned her own partner (Yano), and instead mated with her neighbour who lived on the
monocot bed over the road from the public toilets (RrbR).
In order to breed females need to disperse away from the territory in which they were born, but males try and inherit the family real estate. We can trace uBgr back to the foundation of the study over 30 years ago, and
his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother (BRN) was one of the first birds we ringed. She is one of our best females, and had 74 grandchildren. One of her mates (WYB) was featured in David Attenborough’s
Life of Birds.
Thereafter for uBgr we know his male ancestors, who all lived in the region of the rockery and the monocot bed.
|
Bird
|
Sex
|
Season born
|
Fidelity
|
Relationship
|
|
BRN
|
F
|
<1987
|
Unknown
|
Great (*5)-grandmum
|
|
NRY
|
M
|
1988
|
Unknown
|
Great (*4)-granddad
|
|
gwNY
|
M
|
1992
|
Legitimate
|
Great (*3)-granddad
|
|
wmYA
|
M
|
2000
|
Illegitimate
|
Great (*2)-granddad
|
|
noYY
|
M
|
2003
|
Legitimate
|
Great-granddad
|
|
RarG
|
M
|
2010
|
Illegitimate
|
Granddad
|
|
RrbR
|
M
|
2013
|
Illegitimate
|
Dad
|
|
uBgr
|
M
|
2016
|
Illegitimate
|
|
So thanks again – dispersal records such as this one are rare and valuable. I have copied this e-mail to Nicki Taws, who kindly forwarded your message to me
Cheers
Andrew Cockburn
