Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond

This morning we were scheduled for a session on the plateau area and its surrounding hedgerow adjacent to the Chelworth Industrial Estate which, we refer to as Blakehill Farm East. We had a good turnout this morning, with David, Steph, Laura and Adam to help. Everybody was looking forward to the start of our normal Autumn migration catch, particularly Whinchat, which is the only place we catch them, with the single exception of one at the Meadow ponds in the Ravensroost complex in September 2019. In 10 years we have caught 63 of them on Blakehill East.

It was a 5:30 start, I opened the main gate, drove down to the gate onto the plateau and waited for the team to arrive. Because of the distance to the net rides, and the amount of equipment we have to take, I take the car out to the centre of the ringing site. With everybody assembled I went to unlock the padlock on the gate: nothing. Absolutely jammed solid. I am not sure that even a liberal dose of WD40 would have done the trick. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my usual can with me in the car. We briefly contemplated doing it all from the gate but nobody wanted to spend the morning jumping over the gate carrying equipment and then doing the same with any birds we caught, finishing off by having to remove it all at the end of the session. Instead we decided to go around to the farm side, Blakehill Farm West, and set the nets there, although it isn’t long since we were last there and caught 36 birds from 13 species, two of which were Magpies.

Anyway, we cracked on and got the nets setup but, with the delayed start we didn’t get them open until 7:30: a good hour catching time lost! We set the following nets:

One of the issues I thought we might have is that I changed my lures to reflect the expected catch for the plateau and hedgerow. With the exception of Whitethroat, we don’t usually catch Stonechat, Whinchat or Meadow Pipit on this side of the reserve. I was right!

We started catching straight away, but it was sporadic, small catches each round, with the exception of the round at 8:45, where we had 12 birds. The list for the session was: Blue Tit 1(2); Great Tit [7]; Wren [2]; Dunnock 1; Robin [6]; Blackbird [1]; Blackcap 2[4]; Whitethroat 1[6]; Chaffinch [1]; Reed Bunting [1]. Totals: 5 adults ringed from 4 species, 28 juveniles ringed from 8 species and 2 birds retrapped from 1 species.

So, not the biggest catch, but some nice parts to it. To start with, seven Whitethroat is a nice haul for this site. We had another fall of juvenile Robin and Great Tit. To start with, we thought Robin would make up 50% of the catch, but Great Tit and Whitethroat overtook them.

We did have the cutest juvenile Reed Bunting. It was in full juvenile plumage, with no sign of any white collar. Although I didn’t sex it on data entry, because it hadn’t started its post juvenile moult, I am pretty sure it was female. It was so cute I was going to put up a photo: but Mr Ham Fisted (me) allowed it to escape whilst putting it into the photographic grip.

However, we also had an interesting juvenile Chaffinch.

It was undergoing its post-fledging moult. Looking from above there was no trace of blue in the crown, nor any other obvious indicators from casual observation. Fortunately, Steph’s eyesight is better than mine (in my defence, the sun was incredibly bright and I didn’t have my sunglasses with me) and she picked out these:

Nice pink patches developing on the breast – so a juvenile male Chaffinch.

It was getting hot by 11:00, the birds had taken shelter, so we thought that we should as well. We shut up shop and took down. Every net set had caught something, so that was good. The only unfortunate thing is that our T-junction set up, once the absolute stalwart of our catching area, failed again to do a good job. We used to be able to rely on it for a good 20 birds a session, at least five of which would be House Sparrows. The majority would be the 9m net comprising the branch off to the farm gate but, with no observable change to the make up and, from the noise they generate, no obvious fall off in numbers, we just don’t catch in there any more.

One other slightly unfortunate incident: we caught a beautiful male Bullfinch. Sadly, although it was early signs, it looked as though it had Fringilla papillomavirus, and had slight crusting at the top of each lower leg. Laura did get a fabulous video of it sitting on Adam’s hand, which I would love to post, but there are some funny people out there, so I will run it past the BTO first.

Anyway, we were off site by midday. Driving onto the site first thing, apart from the stag Roe Deer that ran alongside my car, he was on the plateau, for a considerable distance (I was only doing 10mph) a couple of Skylarks fluttered across in front of me, giving excellent views.

However, the highlight of the day for me was, as keyholder and closing all the gates, etc, I saw a largish white bird fly up from the plateau by the cattle and land on a post just in front of me. I stopped to look, but it didn’t stay long, certainly not long enough for me to get my phone out for a photo. I have seen them in other countries but this was my first UK Cattle Egret! I know they have been around some of the other Wiltshire Wildlife Trust farmland reserves, but I love a first for me for the UK. A lovely end to the day!

A quite exhilarating month in so many ways: starting with our highest ever July catch and the highest average per session.  Last July was our previous largest catch, so it is a year-on-year improvement.   As with last time, I have excluded pullus ringing sessions from the average catch per session. As usual, Jonny made up the vast bulk of the catch but I was pleased that our team doubled last year’s catch figure (even if it was only from 115 to 240).

We did process fewer species this month, but had some nice additions as well.  Added this month were Coal Tit, Magpie and four Skylark pulli.  Missing were: Grasshopper Warbler, Lapwing, Meadow Pipit, Moorhen, Woodpigeon and Yellow Wagtail.

The key bird in our catch was the Skylark   These are the first four Skylark pulli we have ever processed.  It is all down to Jonny’s work with local farming hubs and the way they have bought into conservation of grassland species.  The farmer in question has made fabulous efforts. Having found the nest, she marked out a square of 20m x 20m so that the hay cutting went nowhere near it.  

Whilst we were processing them we had the fabulous site of a decent flock of Lapwing flying around the bottom of the field: a combined group of adult and juveniles, many of which Jonny has ringed this year, and, hopefully, last year, but we didn’t have our binoculars to look for colour rings.

The Magpie catches are interesting.  Since January 2013 the group has ringed 44 Magpies: seven of them this year: four this month, one each in Lower Moor Farm and Laura’s back garden and two in the fields behind the Whitworth building.  Last month we also ringed two Magpies in the same field at Blakehill Farm.

Of our summer visitor warblers, we saw a significant increase in numbers of Blackcap, Sedge Warbler and Whitethroat but significant falls in the number of Chiffchaff and Lesser Whitethroat.  All others were stable.

Our resident birds showed a huge increase in Blue Tit, Goldfinch, Greenfinch and Robins ringed.

I have spent the last couple of years working in the southernmost end of Ravensroost Wood, as there has been a fair amount of forestry management going on in the north end of the wood. I have decided that I need to start working back through the wood to see what impact, if any, this work has had on the catchable population. It can go one of two ways: the Firs and Webb’s Wood have shown a superb recovery after their thinning and management works: more birds from more species, recovery within two years of the work. Red Lodge, not so good: it took a lot longer to recover and numbers are still down on what they were before the thinning started. However, we do catch a few more finches than we used to.

With it being just myself and David today, I decided to keep things as manageable as possible. We met at 5:30 and we set a fairly compact net ride system:

The black line across the end of ride 4 is where blocked off access, tying up the gate and putting a “No Access” sign. These rides are all nets we have used successfully before, so I was hopeful of a decent catch. Unfortunately, hope is often misplaced. It wasn’t just slow, it was glacial! We had the nets open by 6:15 and sat and waited, and waited. The first bird was caught at 8:30: it was a Robin. Our next catch arrived at 9:35: two Juvenile Blue Tits. Following that, our hopes were raised again, by a catch of nine birds: Blue Tit, Nuthatch, Treecreeper and six juvenile Willow Warblers. After that, nothing until we decided we had been there long enough. I started taking down ride 1, whilst David was shutting the other rides and extracted our 13^th bird of the morning: our 17^th Marsh Tit of the year! Their numbers are going well and staying ahead of last year! Another three this month, which has been our standard for the last three years, and we will be three ahead of last year’s tally.

However, the six juvenile Willow Warblers is our best single autumn catch of the species at any of our sites.

The list for the session was: Treecreeper 1; Nuthatch [1]; Blue Tit [3]; Marsh Tit [1]; Robin 1; Willow Warbler [6]. Totals: 2 adults ringed from 2 species and 11 juveniles ringed from 6 species.

Certainly not our best by any stretch, but not our worst! We were packed up and away by noon. Our next session at the Wood will be down by the two ponds at the top (north) end of the wood, hopefully with a better result.

I was joined this morning by quite a large cohort from my team: Miranda, Ellie and Pete. as well as Sarah and young Dorothy. Dorothy has only been out for four sessions where she actually got to process birds. Today was a big day for her: she extracted her first bird, a Blackcap (start them with easy, non-pecking birds). She also got to successfully process her first Song Thrush: handled it very well and got the biometrics 100% correct.

So, what did the Firs deliver? This:

We caught our first two in the Firs at the beginning of August 2016, followed by one in Red Lodge in late middle August. These were the first ever recorded as having been ringed in the Braydon Forest. Our next was a juvenile, caught in a net in Ravensroost Wood in August 2018. What is a little surprising is that we had seen them on multiple occasions in the wood, just never caught them.

Our next two were back in the Firs in June 2019: these were two juveniles and I am fairly confident they had to have bred there. We caught one in a Mipit triangle at Blakehill Farm, on the plateau in September 2022, then nothing until was caught another in June 2025 and then again today. So, we have caught 10 in the Braydon Forest since 2016, and six of them have been in the Firs: our smallest woodland site.

One other pleasant catch: our seventeenth Marsh Tit ringed so far this year. This is our best haul of ringed Marsh Tits in the first seven m0nths: two more than at this stage with last year’s excellent final total. It could be interesting.

The list for the session was: Blue Tit [5](3); Great Tit [2](1); Marsh Tit [1]; Wren Spotted Flycatcher [1]; Robin [9](2); Song Thrush [3]; Blackbird (1); Blackcap 2[13](1); Chiffchaff 1[1]; Willow Warbler [3]. Totals: 4 adults ringed from 3 species, 39 juveniles ringed from 10 species and 3 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 52 birds processed from 11 species. A pretty decent haul, given the weather conditions. It is our third best July catch in the Firs.

Pete had to leave at 10:00 for a business meeting. To be honest, the catch had reduced significantly by that time. Over the next 30 minutes the temperature rose significantly and so we closed up the nets and took them down. It was a quick clean up, given that we only had 12 nets up, covering about 160m of the woodland. The Trust had done a great job of cleaning up the underfoot vegetation and that was very helpful. I have to thank Miranda, Ellie, Sarah and Dotty for taking the nets down, packing them away and doing all of the hard work. Unfortunately, by then, I was absolutely wrecked for a large number of reasons that I won’t bore you with. Anyway, we were packed up and ready to leave by just gone half-past noon. A lovely session, some excellent birds caught and processed, what’s not to like!

A better morning than recently at Lower Moor Farm and, for once, I got to do a decent amount of ringing. When I have two or more of my team out, I tend to scribe and ensure that the data I am being given is correct. If it is a large catch then I will join in the actual processing. This session I was joined by Ellie, and she had to leave at 10:30, so I spent the last couple of hours working and packing up solo. That was the quietest part of the morning, as the birds took shelter from the sun. We met at 5:30 and set the usual nets. The benefit of this site is that the rides are never in full sun and, apart from one ride, relatively wind proof, as well as having a decent amount of biodiversity.

We started catching straight away, and had a pretty reasonable set of net rounds. The best catch time was between 8:00 and 10:30, when Ellie left. After that I caught another seven birds. Annoyingly, the two rounds where I was closing the nets before taking down, the one at 12:00 produced two birds, who flew in as I was closing the nets they flew into, and a Robin, at 12:30, flew in after I had closed that net ride and actually whilst I was taking those nets down. Always great fun. Despite the potential for difficulty, he hadn’t grabbed too much net and came out very easily.

My favourite catch of the day was the unfairly much maligned Magpie:

This is only the second Magpie to be caught and ringed at this site. The first was caught 11 years ago, and was a juvenile. Ours was a second Calendar Year female undergoing her post-breeding moult. Just a note for the Magpie haters: there are just over 500k breeding pairs of Magpie in the UK, they have one brood per year normally of six chicks and the mortality rate of their chicks is estimated, from BTO data, at 80% over the first six months from fledging. There are at least 10 times as many breeding pairs of Blackbird, they can have up to four broods per year of, usually, four young. Their first six month mortality rate is 40%. It puts so-called Magpie nest predation into a different context, given that, in my opinion, over the course of a lifetime each pair of Blackbirds only needs to produce a total of four young to ensure population stability and some growth. Any data on this can be gleaned from the BTO’s BirdFacts database, which is free for the general public to use.

The list for the session was: Magpie 1; Blue Tit [4]; Great Tit [2]; Wren [3](1); Dunnock [3]; Robin [5]; Blackbird [1]; Blackcap [14]; Garden Warbler [6]; Whitethroat [2]; Chiffchaff [1]; Bullfinch (1). Totals: 1 adult ringed, 41 juveniles ringed from 11 species and 2 retraps from 2 species, making 44 birds processed from 12 species.

It has been our best year since 2021 for Garden Warbler. Their numbers fell off the cliff after that, with only three caught in each of 2024 and 2025. Our July catch of seven, so far, is the best we have had since July 2017. From 2020 until 2025 inclusive, we caught 2, 3, 3, 1,1,1 in the respective July totals. All seven caught this month have been juveniles: the best return since 16 in 2017. It will be interesting to see what next month brings, as we caught just one in 2022 and no juveniles since then and just one adult in 2025, none in the other years.

Equally, it has also been our best month for ringing Blackcaps since 2019, when we ringed 36, against 21 this month. Unsurprisingly, we ringed the highest total of juveniles in that year (34), with 16 ringed this month.

After Ellie left, I spent quite a lot of time showing children, and their parents, and a few passing, but interested, grown-ups, birds close up and explaining about the ringing scheme and the results it produces.

Unfortunately, dog-walkers were out in force, only a couple of them had their dogs under control. One couple, an elderly woman and, probably, her daughter, had a spaniel that decided to have a swim in Mallard Lake. I heard the ducks making a lot of alarming and said to them “this is a nature reserve, not a park, and your dog should be on a lead”. She shouted at me that she’d put it on a lead as soon as she got it back. Like it was my fault. She then spent 10 full minutes shouting at the beast, whilst it continued to disturb the birds, before it came back. So much for keeping it under close control. I don’t blame the dog, but the law needs to change so that dogs are only allowed off leads in the owner’s garden or in designated dog friendly places. Another couple came down, similar make up to the previous two, but this dog belonged to the younger woman. She was reading from the reserve leaflet, and they stopped by me, and she was talking about which way to go now according to the leaflet. I asked, very politely “Does that leaflet say anything about keeping you dog on a lead?”. To be fair, she was clearly embarrassed, apologised and put the dog on the lead. At least hers had been fully under control!

Anyway, I finally got everything packed away by 1:30 and headed home. As often happens, as I was packing away, the wind really got up. Fortunately, all of the nets had been closed by then, so I didn’t have to spend time extracting them from the Blackthorn and the brambles!

A small session this morning, but a first for the site and a very nice second for the site. I was joined for the session by Laura, Adam and Pete. We met at 5:30, but Pete was leaving at 9:45 for a business meeting and Laura at 10:30 for an orchestra practice, leaving me and Adam for the rest of the session. We set the usual nets in the pond area but, given the size of the crew, didn’t set nets in the field. With the drought conditions, the causeway was uncovered.

It was a very slow session and we didn’t catch too many birds. However, halfway through the session we caught only our second ever juvenile Reed Warblers. The structure of the site has changed and there is now a small reed bed in the larger pond. Potentially, given the moult stage of these two birds, they fledged from here. I will have a look for the nest once I am certain breeding is over.

As well as these two, we also had a first for the site.

We don’t catch many outside of my garden, and have only caught four in the main wood: but none there since three in 2012. There has definitely been an upturn in the numbers coming into my garden, I ring about 10 a year on average, but that is largely dependent upon how many sessions I manage, which is very variable. My biggest catch was 39 in 13 sessions in 2015. Unsurprisingly, 2020 was my second biggest catch, at 31 from 15 sessions. The total is 130 ringed in the eight years I have caught them in the garden, so an average of just over 16 per year. Most of that is due to feeding them – and there has been no sign of Trichomoniasis in any of them for over 10 years! Cleanliness is everything but, also, they don’t come in huge flocks, just two or three at a time, so the danger of disease spreading is very low.

Another nice catch was a male Reed Bunting: we catch the bulk of these at Blakehill Farm in the autumn and winter (248 in 10 years), In that time we have caught just seven in Ravensroost Meadows, until we added one today. The birds caught in the Meadows have all been adults, so no actual sign of breeding there. One lives in hope.

Anyway, our small catch ended up on: Blue Tit 1[1]; Great Tit 1[4]; Dunnock 1[2]; Robin 1[2](2); Blackbird 1[2]; Reed Warbler [2]; Blackcap [2]; Chiffchaff [2]; Willow Warbler [1]; Greenfinch 1; Reed Bunting 1. Totals: 7 adults ringed from 7 species, 18 juveniles ringed from 9 species and 2 birds retrapped from 1 species, making 27 birds processed from 11 species.

Adam and I started taking down at 12:30, having caught a few extra birds as we were trying to close the nets, and we were off site by just after 1:00. I drove him home as his usual chauffeuse, Laura, had left for her practice and then concert, doing a French Horn solo Wednesday evening.

With the heatwave abating somewhat, and the forecast being for light basal winds with gusts at 14mph, we decided we could get a session in at Blakehill Farm West. We set up our usual nets, plus a few more, and I also set up three walk-in Potter traps, seeded with mealworms, in the yard where we usually see plenty of Pied Wagtails.

Net rides 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 are 5-shelf Ecotone; ride 4 = 4-shelf North Ronaldsay 1 = 1x 9m + 1 x 12m; 2 = 1 x 12m; 3 = 2 x 18m; 4 = 2 x 18m; 5 = 3 x 18m; 6 = 1 x 18m + 1 x 9m + 1 x 12m. PT = Potter Traps; RS = Ringing Station

I was joined for the morning by Laura, Adam, Pete, Ellie and, until she had to leave to manage her volunteer group at 9:00, Rosie.

We met at 5:00 and had the nets set up by 6:00. We did a lot of rounds, each one only catching a couple of birds, and we ended up with a total of 37 birds! I thought that this was not vert good, until I looked at previous records for the Braydon Forest in July. The average catch, in July between 2013 and 2025, is 25.1 birds, 37 is the best catch we have had since 2018, and only another two years: 2015 and 2017.

There were several highlights of the catch. The first was at 7:50: our third Magpie of the year. Our previous catch was at Blakehill Farm West on the 24th May, when we caught two. Rosie hadn’t ringed one previously, so she was given the privilege of being attacked by it. Obviously they come in twos at this site: we caught the second at 9:30. This time Ellie did the “honours”. Adam was offered the opportunity but declined as he thought his hands would be too small. However, he did get the opportunity to handle and release the bird, to practice!

At 10:15 I extracted two Goldfinch and our second juvenile House Sparrow of the year – the previous was in my garden on the 9th July. This one was a bit more advanced than my one:

These were followed by a nice catch of two Whitethroat and our second Lesser Whitethroat of the year.

We could tell it was a female, it had a well-developed brood patch that had started feathering over.

Our Potter traps were a complete failure: clearly the Pied Wagtails have pushed off, probably following the cattle for insects on their dung! They have been very successful in my garden, catching Starlings, so I loaned one to Laura so that she could try in her garden. She sent me this photo in the evening:

Having learned that he could safely handle a Magpie, Laura, having successfully caught one in the Potter trap, called Adam out to process it!

The list for the session was: Magpie 2; Treecreeper [2]; Blue Tit [1]; Great Tit [1]; Long-tailed Tit [2]; Wren 1[2]; Dunnock 1[1]; Robin [5](1); Whitethroat 1[1]; Lesser Whitethroat 1; Chiffchaff 2[2]; Goldcrest [1]; Goldfinch 3[1]; House Sparrow [1]. Totals: 14 adults from species, 21 juveniles from 13 species and 2 retraps from 2 species: making 37 birds from 15 species. It is the first time we have caught three in one day!

We packed up a little after midday and left site soon after.

This heatwave is proving to be quite schizophrenic: the morning started cool at 4:30. It was overcast and very grey. The sun didn’t even begin to peep through until after we had packed up. I was joined for the morning, at 5:00, by Laura, Pete and Ellie. Ellie is just back from her three-month volunteer stint on Skokholm. I suspect that a few birds in a typical woodland doesn’t compare to ringing Manx Shearwater, Storm Petrel and Puffin! She is heading back at the end of August for the autumn migration.

We set the usual nets, and added on an extra 36m along the main drag. Our catches in Red Lodge in July have not been great: between 2015 and 2020 they averaged 30 birds per July session. Between 2021 and 2025 the average catch was just six per July session: four ringed and two retraps per session. That’s why we set the extra nets. The fact is that we did have a better than average catch. Still just the two retrapped birds: Nuthatch 1; Treecreeper [1]; Great Tit 1[2](1); Wren [3]; Robin [8](1); Blackbird 1[1]; Chiffchaff [1]. Totals: 3 birds ringed from 3 species, 16 juveniles ringed from 6 species and 2 birds retrapped from 2 species, making 21 birds processed from 7 species.

We are helping with a bio-blitz at Lower Moor Farm on Saturday, moth trapping Friday night for analysis Saturday morning. Hopefully we will have a better more interesting catch this weekend.

One very pleasant interlude, we met one Jon Beresford who was on-site doing a butterfly survey. Apparently the first one in Red Lodge for five years, as the previous surveyor had retired and nobody had taken it on until now. Like us, when we met he hadn’t had the best of luck, unlike our fabulous White Admirals and Silver-Washed Fritillaries at Webb’s Wood last Thursday. However, his fortunes did improve later in his walk when he managed to get this fabulous photograph:

The Braydon Forest is pretty good for butterflies and moths, my back garden, in the middle of Purton, also within the Forest boundaries, has delivered 467 species, including, at the time, a first for Wiltshire:

They were eradicated as a pest species in the early 20^th century, last recorded in 1907, and not seen again until the 1950’s, with accidental reintroductions and some possible migrants from mainland Europe. Since then they have spread along southern coastal areas but, since my discovery of them in August 2012, they are now found quite regularly in Wiltshire. You used to have to notify their existence to MAFF, initially, and now DEFRA, but appreantly that is no longer the case.

Anyway, we shut the nets at 11:30 and took down and left site about 12:15. Always nice to have a good chat and catch up with Ellie about what she had seen and done on Skokholm. One good thing for her, not an opportunity much of the team get, she is now licensed to work with adult and pullus Manx Shearwater and Storm Petrel! She is one up on her trainer, although I have no species restriction on pulli of cliff-nesting or colony nesting seabirds, I don’t have the same for adults!

With this heatwave I am reluctant to cause any disruption to the birds coping out in our woods and farmland. However, those that are costing me a fortune feeding in my garden I thought are fair game, provided I packed up before the heat properly set in. I did decide, though, that once the temperature hit 23^oC I would close the nets: so they were open from just 5:30 until 8:00, by which time it was baking hot, although there was a reasonable breeze The other reason I chose to make it a garden session was that, it was going to be short and I didn’t think it fair to bring the team in from Cirencester and Malmesbury for a very short session.

I set the nets the night before: 2 x 6m and 1 x 3m nets set in a squared off U-shape around the feeders and alongside the pond. I was going to do a map showing the net positions, but both OS Maps and Google Maps are rubbish at high resolution when using their aerial shots. Quick diagram:

A and C are the 6m nets and B is the 3m. FS = Feeding Stations. The foliage marked is 1: dwarf cherry; 2: apple tree; 3: plum tree; 4: dwarf crab apple; 5: two conifers; 6: a variety of shrubs, both wild and cultivated. Not shown is that the garden has recently been lightly strimmed after no mow October to June! There is also, quince, holly, hawthorn, pear, more plum and a large aspen in the top of the garden. This probably explains why I have trapped over 450 species of moth in the garden!

Anyway, it was a fairly typical garden session for this time of year. The only surprise was an adult female Blackcap. It is only the fifth that I have caught in my garden. It is the first adult I have caught for 6 years. The most recent was a juvenile in July 2024.

Another nice feature of the catch were three Greenfinch: two males and a females. There should have been a fourth, my first juvenile of the year, but Mr Incompetent lost control of it getting it out of the bag. It spent the rest of the session flying around the garage – even though I had the door wide open so its escape would be very easy. It finally left about 11:30!

The list for the morning was: Blue Tit 2[9](1); Great Tit [1]; Dunnock [1](1); Blackbird (1); Blackcap 1; Greenfinch 3; House Sparrow 1. Totals: 6 adults ringed from 4 species, 11 juveniles ringed from 3 species and 3 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 21 birds processed from 7 species.

It could have been better but I had a Stock Dove escape the net before I could get to it, ditto a juvenile Blackbird and another juvenile Dunnock. Surprisingly, no Goldfinch put in an appearance. There were plenty in the garden yesterday! I wonder who warned them? Completely absent from the garden now, since my last session, are the Starlings! Not one seen for a few days. I have my Potter traps out, loaded with mealworms, in case the Starlings decide to drop in or the Jackdaws decide they want a feed. We had an adult in the garden yesterday being pestered by two newly fledged juveniles. Fingers crossed.

Laura did a similar thing yesterday but had a much more interesting catch: Green Woodpecker 1; Great Spotted Woodpecker [1]; Blue Tit [1]; Great Tit [1]; Dunnock [1](1); Robin [1]; Blackbird 2[2]. Totals: 3 adults ringed from 2 species; 7 juveniles from 6 species and 1 retrap, making 11 birds from 7 species.

The thing is, just like my garden, Laura’s is usually full of Goldfinch and one would expect them to have figured in both hauls. Definitely a bit perplexing.

Having had such excellent hauls in the Firs in June, it was time to have a go in Webb’s Wood. It is exactly 680m due south from the ringing station in the Firs to that in Webb’s Wood. I was hopeful that we would find a similar result in Webb’s. Unfortunately, hopes were not fulfilled. It was just a very ordinary session. However, it was almost exactly our average number for sessions carried in July in Webb’s Wood.

I was joined by Pete, Rosie and Ella. Rosie was my regular trainee until she changed job and started working for the Herefordshire Wildlife Trust. However, she still does occasional sessions for the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust volunteers, and this morning was running a pond dipping session for the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust’s children’s Watch Group at 9:30. When she does that she brings her friend Ella with her and comes along to help us set up and stays. Ella has been out with us once before and is great company: which is just as well as we had plenty of time to chat during the morning. We all met at 5:00. Fortunately, the weather wasn’t too hot and, even more fortunately, most of the boggy area had dried out. We set the following nets:

I didn’t overdo the nets because Rosie was going to be leaving at 9:00, which would leave just me and Pete to look after them as Ella had never extracted Passerines before, nor ringed any before today. when started I training her to do so.

It wasn’t busy but it was a very pleasant morning with some lovely birds. We were pleased to get yet another juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker, our fifth of the year to date. This is our best year to date catch of juvenile Great Spotted Woodpeckers since we started the Braydon Forest project in late 2012.

Another nice addition to the list was the catch of three Willow Warblers: two males and one female. All three were adults undergoing their post-breeding moult, with the females brood patch just starting to feather over. The wings were very definitely in full moult:

The list for the session was: Great Spotted Woodpecker [1]; Blue Tit [3]; Great Tit [8]; Dunnock [1]; Robin 1[6](2); Song Thrush 1; Blackbird [1](1); Blackcap [2]; Chiffchaff 1; Willow Warbler 3. Totals: 6 adults from 4 species, 22 juveniles from 7 species and 3 retrapped birds from 2 species, making 31 birds processed from 10 species.

The juvenile Blackbird did give as a bit of concern: it had a nasty looking, scabby, almost lichen like, area in its lower abdomen, close to the cloaca. I have not seen anything like it before. If anybody recognises what it is I would grateful to know!

As well as a reasonable catch, we did have a lovely morning watching butterflies. Best was a White Admiral, we saw a couple but one spent a good few minutes flying around us at the ringing station. At one point it looked as if it was going to land on me. Alongside that was Silver-washed Fritillary, lots of Gatekeeper, a Marbled White and the obligatory Meadow Browns.

We closed the nets at 11:45 and took down. Rosie was back at 12:00 to pick up Ella and get her back to Hereford for the choir concert she was taking part in Saturday evening.