After what can only be described as a ghastly weekend, for a wide range of reasons, not least the nerve shredding last 10 minutes of the second-half of England vs Switzerland (I was always confident of the penalties) and wet and windy weather, I decided to take a chance on the forecast that said it would be dry with low wind in our area until mid-morning and do some ringing. My garden is, unfortunately, a bit of a wind tunnel. I think it is because we have a detached double garage with a three metre gap to the house. I have planted plenty of trees, alongside those that were already there, but it doesn’t get any better and I can only open my nets in calm conditions.
The garden has been alive with birds, eating me out of house and home, for months now, so I was hopeful of a reasonable catch. Just in the last week we have had plenty of Jackdaws, Starlings, Greenfinch, Goldfinch, Chaffinch, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Wren, Robin, Blackbird, Dunnock, Woodpigeon, Collared Dove and Stock Dove. I set the nets, just two x six metre, five-shelf Merlin nets, either side of my feeding station and furled them ready for action. I had planned to open them about 6:00 but I woke up at ridiculous o’clock (4:00) and, after struggling to doze for a bit longer, got up and topped up the feeders, set out some mealworms in Potter traps and opened the nets.
I was hoping for a nice catch of Greenfinch and Goldfinch, as we have had plenty of adults and juveniles coming into the garden, and it is about the only place that I regularly catch them amongst my sites.
The catch was decidedly weird in its timings: a small fall of birds, followed by a long gap, followed by another small fall, etc. First round produced three juvenile Blue Tits and three juvenile Robins. I was very pleased with the juvenile Robins: I had seen one hopping around the place but not as many as I would have liked. In the end I caught five this morning: two were recently fledged and hadn’t started their post-fledging moult, two were undergoing their moult and the fifth had actually completed their post-juvenile moult and was in full adult plumage. Its wings were very fresh and its tail was fresh and very pointed, hence I could reliably age it as a bird of this year.
Unsurprisingly, the Blue Tits kept coming in in twos and threes, until I had processed eleven of them: ten ringed and one retrap. What I remarked upon on the UK Ringers Facebook Group is that, as well as being a ringer, I have been a member of the BTO’s Garden Birdwatch scheme for even longer than I have been ringing. In that scheme you make a note of the largest number of a particular species you see at any one time. So whilst my ringing return is eleven birds my GBW return is just three. It makes sense to keep it consistent for GBW: if you keep adding up every time you see a bird of a particular species in your garden that day, you don’t know if you are seeing individual birds or the same bird multiple times, and all combinations in between. That is why ringing can give reliable quantitative data for birds but simple observation cannot.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get my hoped for good numbers of Greenfinch and Goldfinch, but I did get one of the former, a second-year female in full breeding condition, and two of the latter: a second year male in full breeding condition and a nearly fully moulted juvenile (also a male).
There weren’t too many Starlings trying to take advantage of the mealworms, either in the Potter traps or on the feeding stations. I did catch two juveniles and a second year adult male in my mist nets but that was it. I also caught a juvenile Dunnock and a juvenile Blackbird.
However, there was one unexpected bonus:
Juvenile Blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla
Since I started ringing in my back garden, back in 2013 when I got my C-permit, until now, I had only ever caught three Blackcaps in my garden, all adults, so to catch this lovely, recently fledged, juvenile was a nice result for me.
The list for the session was: Blue Tit 1[9](1); Dunnock [1]; Robin [5]; Blackbird [1]; Blackcap [1]; Starling [2](1); Goldfinch 1[1]; Greenfinch [1]. Totals: 2 adults ringed from 2 species, 21 juveniles ringed from 8 species and 2 birds retrapped from two species, making 25 birds processed from 8 species.
With the rain moving in at 11:00, I could see it approaching, I closed and took down the nets, and had everything packed away just as the rain started falling: impeccable timing. At 12:30 the rain stopped briefly. Suddenly there were half-a-dozen Greenfinch and Goldfinch, about 20 Starlings, five Jackdaws and three Woodpigeons. It soon started raining again and has continued to do so ever since, with a Meteorological Office yellow warning of heavy rain to come until tomorrow evening. Deep joy: there are some benefits to living close to the top of a hill.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 