I had planned to run this session last Sunday. The weather forecast was fine: a dry day, low winds and sunshine. So we arrived on site for our 5:30 start, only as I pulled into the site it started raining. Laura and her boys pulled in alongside me and we waited to see what would happen. At 6:00, with the rain still falling, we decided that going home and back to bed was a better bet. With other commitments, today was the last available within the timeframe for CES session 5. I was joined for the session by Miranda and Rosie. Rosie did her usual of helping set up and process some birds before heading off to work for the Wildlife Trust. Today she had to leave at 8:00 but, fortunately, we had a decent early catch and she managed to process 15 birds before heading off to work. For once I was able to help pay her back for some of her efforts, by taking 20 minutes out to help her load a new picnic table / bench combination for the new Great Wood complex onto the trailer being used to transport it. It was very heavy: there is no way that she could have done that on her own.
Given that the forecast for today was for it to be sunny all day with some light winds, it was dull, overcast and much blowier than expected when we arrived. Fortunately, although it took a fair while for the clouds to break and allow the sun through, there was no rain and our nets are in sheltered enough positions to allow us to work with the way the winds were blowing. The sun eventually broke through at about 10:00, the wind dropped right down, and the weather became very pleasant.
We had the nets open pretty quickly, but didn’t get our first birds until 6:45. It was nice to have females of both Garden Warbler and Cetti’s Warbler in that first catch. Nothing else was caught until 7:30, whereupon we had a mixed fall of 22 birds: mainly Long-tailed Tits, but Chiffchaffs, Blackcaps and Blue Tits as well – and our first juvenile Wren of the year:
Recently Fledged Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes
By recently fledged I mean that it has clearly left the nest, but hasn’t yet started its post-fledging moult, whereby it grows body feathers on the belly, along the flanks and under the wings.
There are lots of things I like about Wrens, starting with their torturing of trainee ringers learning to extract them. Unlike Blue Tits, they are not feisty but they are superb at crawling through the mesh of the net, taking lots of it with them and “double pocketing”. Perhaps their commonest trick is twisting the net: they can take a piece of net and spin twenty, thirty or more times within it, making it look impossible to extract them. It isn’t: it just takes patience.
Their binomial is pretty good: double cave-dweller! One thing that this photo shows very clearly is the way that the dark and light edging on the primary feathers line up so neatly. This is a key identifier for first year birds and for second year birds until they go through their first post-breeding moult. They line up nicely because in the young bird all of the primary wing feathers grow simultaneously. When the adults and second year birds moult their primaries post-breeding, they do it ascendantly. What that means is that the moult starts from the primary nearest the body and each feather is replaced in turn, leading to the outer edge of the wing. As a result, the edge never lines up in such a neat way again.
It was a lovely session: we finally had a halfway decent catch: Blue Tit [8]; Great Tit [2]; Long-tailed Tit 1[7](6); Wren 1[2](1); Dunnock [2](1); Robin [5]; Blackbird (1); Cetti’s Warbler (1); Blackcap 1[4](3); Garden Warbler 1; Chiffchaff [7](1). Totals: 4 adults ringed from 4 species, 37 juveniles ringed from 8 species and 14 birds retrapped from 11 species.
When compared to CES 5 last year this is a big improvement: that was 7 adults ringed from 6 species, 22 juveniles ringed from 7 species and 9 birds retrapped from 6 species, making 38 birds processed from 12 species.
It is our biggest catch at any of my sites since the 16th February this year, but that was promoted by the supplementary winter feeding that I stopped at the end of that month.
It was a very pleasant morning, with some excellent experiences. Perhaps the best was when Rosie and Miranda noticed a very direct line moving across Mallard Lake. This line suddenly became a hairy backside emerging from the water, then under again and up again. We had a good ten minutes watching the Otter as he chased, caught, and then proceeded to munch his way through his breakfast! He had his breakfast long before we did.
Next on the agenda was what Miranda originally thought was a cow imitating a Bittern, which actually was a Bittern booming! I have been lucky enough to see Bittern flying over the reserve on a couple of occasions, and we know that they breed elsewhere in the Water Park. However, there are currently no suitable reedbeds at Lower Moor Farm, so perhaps it was prospecting or fishing.
Finally, a late male Cuckoo calling as we were packing away. Miranda and I closed the nets at midday and took down. We were away from site around about 13:00.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 