With the aid of digital photography I have attempted to follow individual breeding Marsh Harriers over the last 15 years trying to obtain comparable images of what I take to be the same returning birds in successive years showing the changes in plumage from year to year. This gallery attempts to show the plumage development of a few individuals all photographed at nest sites in the breeding season.

Below is a sequence of a breeding male that first adopted a local territory in 2009 and has bred in the same area annually ever since. In the first five years of breeding this male was monogamous and of five nesting attempts three failed with seven young reared in the other two years. From his 8th calendar year this male has been bigamous in five of the last seven years and of 12 nesting attempts only one has failed and he has reared 29 young in seven years making a total of 36 young fledged in his life time.

Bird number two is of known age due to being wing-tagged at ringing.

Lime tags SH was ringed as a nestling in North-west Norfolk, from a nest in an oilseed rape field on June 27th 2014 by the North West Norfolk Ringing group to whom I am grateful for the following information and permission to use their photos of SH in the nest with its siblings Green SI and SJ.

The group have a long-running study of colour ringed and wing-tagged Marsh Harriers from East Anglian nests that has produced some amazing results that can be found on their web site by clicking the link below

 The wing tagging project began in 2011 and by the end of 2023 a total of 904 nestling Marsh Harriers had been ringed and wing tagged. This has resulted in a recovery/sighting rate of 37.94% a result that could not have been anticipated.

 After ringing SH was not seen again until May 12th 2015 when he was at Blacktoft Sands on the upper Humber. The following year in April 2016 I found SH in the lower Ancholme Valley first images. The following year on June 4th I again saw SH and managed a poor record shot of his plumage on June 4th. In 2019 SH took over an established breeding territory in a riverine reedbed and fledged at least one young. SH bred again in 2020 in the same area but in a different small reedbed. Note that some time between 2017 and 2019 SH lost one of his wing tags.

It is interesting that a Norfolk bred bird has moved to North Lincolnshire to breed in an area that already held breeding birds but also that a bird fledged in a crop nest went on to nest in a reedbed site. Between 1993 and 2022 in my study area in North Lincolnshire I have located 415 nests of which only three have been crop nests so the species is clearly highly tied to reedbed sites in this area.

Ageing females is much harder than males and there tends to be a greater change-over of females at some nest sites than males so getting shots over a long period of successive years is challenging.

This is a female, certainly the same bird in the latter years, 2016 - 2020, but the shots in 2013 - 2015 also appear to be the same bird based on specific underwing pattern but the difference in plumage tones is notable though perhaps enhanced by light conditions. All images were taken at the same location.