This session was originally scheduled for last Tuesday but, unfortunately, I was ill and so I put it back to Thursday, only my car decided that it too would throw a sicky, so I had to put it back again to Friday. It is a shame, because it would have added to what has been a spectacular January for the West Wilts group.
The forecast was for it to be dry but windy. Ravensroost Wood is, in areas, quite resistant to wind interference. It did mean that I had to change my net setup, but that was going to happen anyway. Significantly, I have managed to persuade the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust and Natural England to allow me to set up my feeding station again. There has been restricted winter feeding in the wood since the winter of 2009 / 2010. As a precautionary measure against HPAI, last winter the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust ceased all supplementary feeding on their sites. The site is a SSSI, and so Natural England have to give permission for it to resume. I have now been given that permission so, for the first time this winter, Ravensroost Wood has a feeding station set up. I set it up on Monday, whilst in the throes of becoming ill, and went to top it up on Thursday, after my car was fixed and I was feeling a bit better. The squirrels had already vandalised one of the feeders: it had been ripped off the branch and one of the feeding ports had its retaining nut unscrewed. How dexterous are these little furry (expletive deleted)? I topped them up, ready for this morning. When we arrived this morning, the feeders were about half empty, so we knew it was going to be busy.
I was joined by Rosie, Teresa and Andy at 7:30. For those who don’t know the site, this is the spatial relationship between the entrance to the reserve and where we were working:
We set the following nets:
It was very much as expected: we had Blue, Great and Marsh Tits hitting the nets before we had even opened them, The first round was just 11 birds, but that was followed by a couple of very heavy rounds, before it died down again. Funnily enough though, the two last, and quietest, rounds produced the variety in the catch.
Today’s catch was: Great Spotted Woodpecker 1; Nuthatch 4(1); Blue Tit 35(5); Great Tit 11(5); Coal Tit 4(1); Marsh Tit (2); Long-tailed Tit (1); Robin 1(1); Redwing 1; Chaffinch 1. Totals: 58 birds ringed from 8 species and 16 birds retrapped from 7 species, making 74 birds processed from 10 species. If you compare that with the last session in Ravensroost on the 4th January: Blue Tit 1(1); Great Tit 2(1); Coal Tit 1; Long-tailed Tit (3); Wren 1; Robin 1; Blackbird (1); Goldcrest (1). Totals: 6 birds ringed from 5 species and 7 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 13 birds processed from 8 species. What a difference a feeding station makes!
What I was surprised about was the number of unringed Blue Tits we caught. Prior to this the largest catch of unringed Blue Tits caught at this site was 28, back in December 2019. It is our third best ever catch of them (both ringed and retrapped combined) at this site. In fact, it is the second best catch of unringed Blue Tits of any of my sites in the Braydon Forest. The biggest was at a site adjacent to Webb’s Wood on the 14th May 2014. That was because the owner of that site fed constantly throughout the year and was constantly inundated with titmice. It was a fairly big factor in my decision to stop working there. Mind, at the time I had to weigh that against my first ever catches of Mistle Thrush, Fieldfare, Green Woodpecker and Jay!
There are two stand outs from this session: our seventh straight Braydon Forest woodland session in which we have ringed a Great Spotted Woodpecker. That has never happened before. The consistency is phenomenal and, at the risk of boring everyone with repetition, we only ringed four in the whole of 2023. Had I not been ill that would have been seven in January.
First winter female Great Spotted Woodpecker, Dendrocopos major
The second stand out was the catch of five Nuthatch! We have caught six before: three ringed and three retrapped. Today’s catch was four ringed and one retrap. The only other times we have caught and ringed four Nuthatch in a session were on the 23rd October 2015 and 29th August 2016, both times with no retrapped birds. Funnily enough, both of those catches were also in Ravensroost Wood. However, they were also both post-breeding autumnal catches, not half-way through the winter.
Nuthatch, Sitta europaea (photo courtesy of Teresa)
We actually shut the nets early. Although, as previously mentioned, Ravensroost is generally good in windy weather, by 10:30 it was too windy, with huge gusts hitting the ringing station. It wasn’t so bad around the nets, but bad enough, and we shut the nets and took down. We were off site by 11:30.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 