This has to be the wettest November that I can remember. We got out on Saturday, with two days of rain to follow, dry today, so we got to Red Lodge this morning, torrentially wet tomorrow but dry on Friday. With the weekend also looking very wet, I am moving Saturday’s scheduled session at Lower Moor Farm to Friday.
I was joined this morning by Rosie and Claire and then, slightly later, by Teresa and Andy. We set the usual nets in the places used for the last few sessions and I put on a variety of lures. It was a slow start with the first bird not out of the nets until 8:40. However, the next round delivered a small flock of Long-tailed Tits, a Goldcrest and a Wren. After that it went empty, four, empty, empty, three, empty and empty. I was getting pretty fed up with the lack of birds but then we had a surprising round of sixteen birds: mainly Great Tits, but our only Blue Tit of the day, a Coal Tit and three Goldcrests. However, we could only ring sixteen of the seventeen because one of the Great Tits presented like this:
A small Avian Pox pustule. It doesn’t look much, until you turn it around:
And then, its tail looked like this:
The pustule actually had a feather growing through it’s middle. It is the worst Avian Pox I have seen on a single bird. Needless to say, I didn’t put a ring on it and, after releasing it, I used copious amounts of anti-viral hand sanitiser before going near any other birds.
We did catch a few more birds after that, and ended up with a reasonable catch: Blue Tit 1; Great Tit 9(4); Coal Tit 3(1); Long-tailed Tit 5; Wren 1; Robin 3(1); Goldcrest 7(1). Totals: 29 birds ringed from 7 species and 7 birds retrapped from 4 species, making 36 birds processed from 7 species.
Not as good or as varied as the catch in October, with Redwing, Lesser Redpoll and Chaffinch missing from the catch. One upside though: only one Blue Tit to wreak havoc on our fingers! I will be setting up a feeding station there in the next week, so future catches will be larger but, almost certainly, mainly titmice.
Wind had been forecast for the day but it only really started getting up at just after 11:00. It was only affecting one of the rides but we decided to close the nets and take down at 11:30. We were packed away and off-site by 12:45 – a little slower than usual, but that was because I was letting the trainees do the bulk of the net take down, which is something that they need to know how to do.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 