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Hi from Sumatra .There's much higher numbers of red knot and great knot hethis year than usual. I found a red knot with a white alphanumeric flag yesterday. Black writing but I couldn't read the number as it walked behind a coral mound. Can someone tell me where it's from. NZ?

The site I've been visiting, pantai jono, had 699 red knot and 345 great knot on 29 sept. Yesterday there were 1282 great knot and 582 red knot, including this white alphanumeric flagged bird.

Hi Andrew,
While not answering your question there is a pic of a Red Knot with a white flag on it's right tibia with 3 letters (BJB) in a paper on R Knot migration on the East Asian Australian flyway.
The image is dated March 2010.
http://globalflywaynetwork.com.au/wp-co ... d-Knot.pdf

Perhaps Canada ?
"Most of the banding and travel flag placement is done in Argentina on their wintering grounds (orange flags), in the Delaware Bay, a prime stop-over on their migration north (lime green flags), and in Canada on their breeding grounds (white flags). "
From
https://stlucieaudubon.org/hartBeat/hb2 ... 5flag.html
The birds shown in the pics have alphanumeric flags.
Have fun

Hi Andrew,
We do - white flags with 3 black letters. Another option could be Chongming Dao if it’s lost the black flag. Their white flags are often squarer than ours - ours tend to long and narrow.
Cheers

On a number of red knots at the Manawatu Estuary white flags have been placed, like seen in picture below.

Hi Andrew, it could be an NZ birds or as Gillian suggests it could be a Chinese bird. The geolocator tracking work I did on NZ knots showed them using The Gulf of Carpentaria and/or West Papua/PNG on southward migration, so a fair way from Sumatra, but we also know that birds banded as youngsters in NZ need not stay here forever. You just need to see that bird again!
Phil

Hi guys. The shape of the flag was longish like the NZ ones. Yellow sea and NW Australian red knots have been seen in sumatra and numbers of red knot coming to sumatra is much greater now that it used to be. I've been a regular wader watcher in sumatra since 1994.
I've passed this information on to local wader researchers who hopefully may be able to visit the area and try to refine the bird - although it is quite a distance for them to travel. I'll also hp thru the 50 or so photos I took to see if I managed to photograph it by chance.
Cheers from the wilds of sumatra.

A few pics copied from camera to phone of the birds here

Hi Andrew,
If the flag really is a combination of letters and a number on a WHITE (rather than faded YELLOW) flag it is probably from Chongming Dongtan Nature Reserve, Shanghai. However there should be a BLACK flag above the WHITE.
David