Colour mark example: Red Knot with inscribed flag

On this knot we can see most of both legs but the bottom of the bird's right leg is slightly obscurred in the mud.


The bird's left leg clearly has a blue ring above the "knee" and nothing below. We read the combination starting from the top of the left leg as " blue over nothing". A useful notation for recording this is to draw a cross to indicate left and right leg, and above and below the knee and enter what you see as shown in the diagram to the right. It is useful to note the "dash" indicating that this part of the leg was seen and no rings were present.


Now look at the right leg. Above the knee is a pale green (lime) flag bearing the inscription "UNK", which is written as FL[UNK] or "flag lime UNK". There are no rings visible on the lower part of the right leg, but we can't see the whole leg due to the mud. To indicate this in the diagram we enter a question mark. It is very helpful to indicate which parts of the leg weren't seen so as to differentiate from no ring present.