(birdsong)
Okay?
Right.
Now to get everything right
Hmm hmm.
I do it this way.  You don’t have to do it this way, but I would suggest that you do it this way.
Hmm hmm.
At the end of the year when you send all your schedules away, you look at every one of your rings and you take down the first ring to be used on the aa.
Right…
And then the a and the b and the cc and the c.
Right.
Then start, whatever you do, start a new page…Now every one of those rings is unique.  It’s a unique number…Let him get the bird in his hand before you record it.  What he’s going to do now is get the ring position in the pliers.  Then he gets the leg in a position so that he can put the ring on.  See he’s all unnerved now.
It’s all nerves now.  Not usually a problem, but erh.
The leg is put into position where the ring can be placed on it.  Closed up.
There we are.
Then the next bit of the process is to record what he’s got in the book there.  He should have a pencil.
There we are.
What we’re trying to do is put the ring on the bird as quickly as possible because some people are apt to let it go.  All of us.
Right, first of all it’s a Blue Tit.
Yep.  What he’ll do now, he will try to tell us (a) what sex it is and (b) how old it is.
It’s a four.
Now, he says it’s a four which means.  Actually it won’t be a f…well it can be a four, yeah, but it definitely wasn’t born last year, was it?
No.
Right, so it’s a six then, isn’t it?
A six now.  Right, that’s what we talked about.
You’ve changed
Last time, wasn’t it?
yep, because you’ve changed the year.
So it’s a six.  Have we got the small?  Yep, yep, there it is.  A good ringer would have had it all completely sorted out.
A person who knew what he was doing would have it ready.