Quite possibly the worst CES session I have ever undertaken. I had to put if off on a number of days because of high winds and rain. Today was forecast to be dry with wind at a base of 12mph, gusting to 24mph. I decided to give it a go and hope that, with the wind forecast to come from the west, there would be sufficient cover to enable me to get through the session. I arrived on site at 5:00, having told Rosie 5:30, but I was awake at 4:30 and there was no point in just staying in bed. As has happened with virtually every CES session this year, the first birds to hit the nets started arriving an hour or more after the nets were opened. This morning it was two hours!
It started slow, and it stayed slow. The problem with carrying out a project like a Constant Effort Site is in those first two words: Constant Effort. The same nets open, in the same positions, for the same length of time, for every session. That means that, no matter how bad it is, I was going to be there for 6 hours before packing up!
Before Rosie had to head off to Morgan’s Hill Wiltshire Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve at about 8:45 to carry out her day job, we caught just half-a-dozen birds. Between then and when I shut them at 11:30, I caught another seven. The real problem was that I had forgotten to pack my book! There is no phone reception at Lower Moor Farm, so I was left with my own company and only nature to distract me.
Actually, I had a lovely morning. Although breezy, the weather was lovely, the sun came out and it was nice and warm, without being horribly hot. Apart from the constant sight of the Rainbow Trout in Mallard Lake leaping out of the water to catch insects, I had some excellent bird watching: before Rosie left, a Cetti’s Warbler spent a good few minutes searching for insects on the leaves of the undergrowth around the base of a large oak tree about 5 metres from where we were sitting. While she was out taking her spaniel, Poppy, for a walk, I was entertained by a Common Tern fishing on Mallard Lake. Soon after a Hobby burst through the tops of the trees lining the path between Mallard Lake and the other two ponds that make up the watery side of the complex. I had lovely views. Later on, a couple of hours later on, whilst chatting to a couple of birders / photographers, a second Hobby turned up chasing after a small flock of Swallows. It gave up and just spent a good five minutes circling overhead.
There was some excellent insect activity as well. The most extracted species of the morning was this:
Female Brown Hawker, Aeshna grandis
There were a lot of them about, as well as plenty of Common Darter, Common Blue, Azure and Red-eyed Damselflies. Extracting dragonflies is a real art: the head is fixed by a very thin, and not very strong, neck. You cannot pull them back through the net but have to either push them through from behind or pull them through if you can get hold of the thorax. I am delighted to say that I successfully extracted every one of the five that hit the nets, plus a female Common Darter.
The other really nice sighting was my first close encounter with copulating moths, in this case, a pair of Chocolate Tips:
Chocolate Tip Moths, Clostera curtula
Once they disentangled from each other they had no difficulty in disentangling themselves from the mist net that supported them throughout the process.
Back to the birds. Of the four net rides that we set, only two of them caught any birds at all. The catch for the day was: Wren [1]; Dunnock (3); Robin (2); Blackbird (1); Blackcap [2]; Chiffchaff 1[3]. Totals: 1 adult ringed, 6 juveniles ringed from 3 species and 6 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 13 birds processed from 6 species. Of the retrapped birds the Robins and two of the Dunnocks were juveniles.
There was quite a lot of frustration: I have never had five birds extract themselves from the nets, just as I reached them, before. Typically it would happen on a day when numbers were scarce. To see how bad it was, the following table shows the catch for CES9 for every year since it started in 2015, plus the nearest session in 2020 (27th July 2020), when the CES was suspended due to Covid:
It will be interesting to see how the final three CES sessions work out. Hopefully we will have a few more birds to process than we have done so far this year! I started packing up at 11:30 and was away from site just in time to hear England’s women score their third goal against China!
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 