Found a ring on a game bird in Haute-Savoie? What to do

Found a ring: what to do

1. Open bagues.gibis.fr on your phone and photograph the ring close up, in good light.
2. Enter the municipality, Annecy or any other in the department; no municipality is ever shown publicly.
3. If the bird carries a wing tag rather than a leg ring, say so at the same step, together with the species.
4. Send the report; name, phone and e-mail are optional, but an e-mail address gets you an acknowledgement.

Report a ring Guide: I found a ring

The regional picture

The other departments of the region are Drôme, Rhône, Isère, Ain, Allier, Ardèche, Cantal, Puy-de-Dôme, Haute-Loire, Savoie and Loire. Three of the 12 departments in the region have their federation on RingFollow: Ain, Isère and Haute-Loire (see the list by region).

Haute-Savoie and its neighbours

Its neighbours are Savoie to the south and Ain to the west. All its neighbours belong, like the department itself, to the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. Among its neighbours, the share of forests and semi-natural areas ranges from 36% (Ain) to 81% (Savoie), against 63% here (CORINE Land Cover 2018). Of these, Ain tracks its rings on RingFollow.

• Ain (01) on RingFollow
• Savoie (73)

What happens to the report

Once sent, the report is kept; if you left an e-mail address, an acknowledgement follows. Next comes the matching: does the ring belong to a recorded release? If so, and if that department's federation is registered, it reviews the recovery. Without a match, the report stays on file for Haute-Savoie, unpublished, until a federation can validate it. The public only sees totals per department; points on the national map are rounded to about 1 km.

The department at a glance

Land cover in 2018 (CORINE Land Cover): forests and semi-natural areas lead with 63%, followed by agricultural areas (27%). The rest is shared between artificial surfaces (9%) and water bodies (1%). About 4,600 km², 279 municipalities and 861,158 inhabitants in 2022: those are the orders of magnitude. The share of artificial surfaces (9%) is higher here than in any of its two neighbours. Its arrondissements are administered from Annecy (prefecture), Bonneville, Saint-Julien-en-Genevois and Thonon-les-Bains.

Sources: INSEE (official geographic code 2025, 2022 population counts), OFB / EEA (CORINE Land Cover 2018), geo.api.gouv.fr (areas).

RingFollow figures for Haute-Savoie

• The count of validated recoveries in Haute-Savoie still stands at zero.
• No report linked to the department is awaiting validation.
• Nationwide, RingFollow records 85 ringed releases (3,592 birds) and 16 validated recoveries, across 5 participating federations.

The breeding side: gibis.fr

RingFollow tracks rings; breeding, species and restocking are covered on gibis.fr: game birds for restocking and red-legged and grey partridges.

What a reported ring is for

The recovery rate is the number of validated rings divided by the number of birds released. It only exists if hunters report, in Haute-Savoie as elsewhere. For an example, see the review of the 2025 pheasant-poult operation (Infochasse mag' no. 72, in French).

A federation that would like to track its rings

A registered federation validates the recoveries in its own department and can export its data. Full list: Federations; contact: gibis@gibis.fr.