After the diabolically poor result at Red Lodge on the 9th July, I was hoping that things would be somewhat better at Webb’s Wood. It was somewhat better – but only just. The whole of the last two months bird ringing has been hugely disappointing, not just in the Braydon Forest (six birds in Red Lodge, nine birds yesterday in Webb’s Wood, 19 birds in Somerford Common somewhat bucking the trend) but all of my sites. I can only presume that it is down to the weather, which has been just dreadful.
I was joined for the session by Miranda and David. We met at 6:00: working on the basis that we aren’t catching birds before 6:30, no matter what time we get to site, it seemed sensible. We had the first net ride, usually the most productive, open by 6:20. However, the place was so quiet and the first bird wasn’t caught until 7:45. That’s not quite true: we did have a Wren in the nets at 7:00. It did that thing that Wrens do, of burrowing through the net, twisting and basically making life difficult. I have one rule for my trainees: if it is proving difficult, call me to help. They are well-trained in that respect and Miranda duly called me away from net-setting to help with the extraction. Which I did, happily, only this klutz , having disentangled it, managed to let it escape.
We did have a very slow morning, lots of opportunity for catching up and chatting. The first bird out of the nets and brought back for processing was a juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker. It was weighed, measured and released, only subsequently to look down at the table and realise that the ring was still sitting there! Oh dear! wasn’t what was said. Thereafter we concentrated somewhat better on the job in hand.
Although it was a small catch, it was a nice catch. The numbers are always decreased when there are no Blue or Great Tits. I really think that they have abandoned the woods for local gardens, especially if the observations and results from my garden are anything to go by. A more regular supply of food with less effort expended searching for it. The first bird processed was a juvenile Robin. All of the birds caught in the session were juveniles, with no retrapped birds. The second bird out of the net was this:
Juvenile Marsh Tit, Poecile palustris
Webb’s Wood, and the adjacent, but tiny, Firs are the least productive sites for Marsh Tit in my Braydon Forest woodlands. It shouldn’t be the case but, apart from the two years of 2017 and 2018, when six were ringed in each year, we have ringed just two in 2013, 2019 and 2020 and just one in every other year. We caught a second later in the session, which takes us to a total of three for 2023 so far. Hopefully it is a good sign and we will end up with a good year for them in Webb’s Wood.
Robins made up the most of the catch, with four of them taken. All were juveniles undergoing their post-fledging moult, but they were all in different stages of that moult: from one that had only just started moulting to the last out of the net that will probably have completed its moult in the next week or so.
We caught two juvenile Chiffchaff, with the final Robin at 9:20 and the second Marsh Tit at 9:45. There wasn’t another bird in the net, apart from Marsh Tit two, who decided to work its way around the other net rides it hadn’t been caught in initially, until 11:20, when we had finally given up. Miranda had left at 11:00, as she was scheduled to spend the afternoon bat box checking with the Wiltshire Mammal Group. Like our bird ringing, all done under officially granted licenses. David and I agreed to shut the nets and take down at 11:15. In the first set I went to take down I extracted a juvenile Goldcrest. It was in the middle of its post-fledging moult, and was just developing its crown feathers, which enabled us to sex it as a male:
Juvenile male Goldcrest, Regulus regulus
You can see the three little orange feathers just emerging from the pin at the bottom right of the bird’s head. (For the benefit of those individuals who got their knickers in a twist when I posted a photo of the crown of a Firecrest ringed at Lower Moor Farm, this bird was being held vertically upright and I took the photo from above. The clue, like the grass in the previously complained of photo, but not by the BTO arbiters of these things, is the ground you can see below the bird.)
So, after a pleasant enough morning, but with disappointingly low numbers, the total catch processed was: Marsh Tit 2; Robin 4; Chiffchaff 2; Goldcrest 1, totalling 9 juveniles ringed and processed from 4 species.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 