A pan-European study on Eurasian wigeon – an amber-listed duck which spends its winters in the UK – has recorded the species’ monumental migration of nearly 10,000km.

One bird, satellite-tagged in Finland, has now revealed its full migratory route between its wintering grounds on the east coast of England and Scotland, across Scandinavia to its breeding grounds in Russia.

Its epic journey was recorded as part of Project Penelope, an international collaborative three-year project led by the Waterfowlers’ Network and scientists at the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC).

The project aims to learn more about the species along their flyway, in the hope that we can better conserve them in the future.

“Seeing the results of this first year’s migration has really opened our eyes to the potential of this study,” said Heather Dixon, science officer at BASC.

“This three-year project will continue to provide data for years to come. It will bring new insights into the movement of wigeon not just within the UK, but across their entire migratory range.”

The project team is using a range of techniques, including colour-ringing and GPS-tracking to learn more about the annual migration, site fidelity and survival rates.

The UK contribution to this project involves trained and licensed volunteers catching and ringing large numbers of wigeon with coded colour rings. The leg rings have engraved codes to identify individual birds in the field without the need to recapture them, which enables us to track their movements, behaviour and survival based on re-sightings in the field.

Our collaborators in Denmark and Finland are also using these colour rings and have been fitting some of the birds with GPS trackers to enable remote tracking of their movements and survival.

Heather Dixon said: “Our first year was not without its bumps in the road for the UK; flooding, Covid-19 and the effects of Avian Influenza caused problems up and down the UK. This sadly meant that some of the field work could not go ahead.

“Despite these issues, we have had tremendous success, colour-ringing a total of 695 wigeon in the UK. These birds generated 37 re-sightings across the country as the wigeon moved throughout the winter.

“The Finnish team has now deployed 57 GPS-trackers in total, in the hope that we can learn more about their migratory passage.”

The project is being funded by the Wildlife Habitat Charitable Trust, the Danish Hunters’ Fund for Nature and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Finland.

To learn more about the project please visit the dedicated website.