I was joined by Teresa, Andy and Miranda for today’s session. As it was forecast to be windy I decided we needed to be in a woodland. As I am, frankly, sick of being plastered in mud, I decided that Webb’s Wood would be best, as we had a lot of available track with decent verges that we could set the nets on. This was about 300m west of our normal ringing site, at the fork in the track. I used this part of the site last September. It didn’t produce a huge catch but there was reasonable variety (as outlined in the post “Thank Goodness for Goldcrests”). We set up a couple more nest than last time, which were set up as below:
The nets were open by 6:30 and we started catching straight away, with four birds: and then it stopped as soon as it started! Over the next four hours we caught just another eight birds that we could process. We did also have three same day recaptures. All around us was a mass of bird song, but it seems that they were only interested in singing and not in moving around.
The list for the morning was: Blue Tit 2; Robin 1; Song Thrush 1; Blackbird 1; Blackcap 5(1); Willow Warbler 1. Totals: 11 ringed from 6 species and one retrap, making birds processed from 6 species.
We did exercise extreme patience in between rounds, rounds which were mainly either one bird or none. It was helped by long chats with a couple of the regular dog walkers we meet at Webb’s: one with a Black Labrador, the other with a Honey Labrador. However, at 10:30 we decided unanimously that we had had enough, and so packed away the nets and headed for home. We were off-site by 11:15. A bit disappointing, but that just seems to be the way with our catches at present.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 