An injured hobby is released back to the wild thanks to an unusual donation

Saffron by Paul Reading

The Hobby is a bird that flies fast and hard. It is often likened either to a giant swift or to a small Peregrine. With a winter diet of large flying insects and a summer diet that includes swallows, martins and dragonflies, it has to be a pretty mean flier to catch its dinner; and when it is also feeding a mate and a fast-growing brood of chicks the workload is intense. Fitness levels have to be very high, as does feather condition.

Last year a Hobby was brought into the Trust’s Bird of Prey Hospital with a broken wing and tail feathers. Vet John Chitty repaired the wing and, with treatment and rest over the winter months the broken wing has completely healed but the tail feathers had not fully regrown - this would prevent fully effective hunting flight.

An old, stuffed bird used as an educational resource to teach children about birds of prey came to the rescue by providing replacement tail feathers that the bird needs to be able to fly well enough to fly thousands of miles to southern Africa for the winter.

Mike Riley flying Saffron. Photo by Lou Richie

Having missed the timing of the annual southward migration last year, the hobby, named Saffron, spent spring and summer at the Trust. Now with the replacement tail feathers fixed by ‘imping’ [imping is the method of repairing broken or damaged tail feathers. The word is derived from the Old English word ‘impian’, meaning to implant or graft], and following a period of exercising under the training of Mike Riley, Saffron is flying well and hunting on the wing and is ready to be set free again in time to join other wild hobbies as they prepare for their migration to Africa.

Chief Executive of the Hawk Conservancy Trust, Ashley Smith explains: “The ingenious solution to use feathers from the stuffed hobby to help Saffron was the brainwave of our Senior Falconer Mike Riley. We keep a pool of miscellaneous feathers from many bird species for just such a repair but because hobbies are so rare we didn’t have any in store for this bird. Hobbies are migrant visitors to Britain and we really didn’t want Saffron to miss this chance to return to her winter hunting grounds in Africa.”

Update, 24th September

Saffron, the injured Hobby, was spotted on the Suffolk coast more than 150 miles (245 km) from her release site. This marks the first leg of her long journey as she attempts the winter migration to southern Africa.

Saffron was seen by Dave Fairhurst, a BirdTrack recorder for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), perched by the side of a road at Dingle Marshes, near Dunwich, on Thursday 20 September. Dave was able to read enough of the unique number on her BTO ring through his binoculars to realise she wasn’t a local bird and so he notified his colleagues at the BTO.

Mark Grantham, Population Biologist at the BTO, checked the ringing records and was able to confirm that the ring number EG76263 did indeed identify the Hobby as Saffron.