I have managed to get in decent number of session recently, despite some awful weather in October. This meant that we had gone round all of our standard sites and it was back to the Firs. It is known locally as the “Braydon Bog” because it is usually so wet underfoot, and I was really expecting it to be as bad as usual, as we have had so much rain recently. Amazingly, it was drier than Webb’s was on Thursday. I was joined for the session by Ellie, her first outing with me since her promotion to a full A-permit, plus Justine and Mark, taking time out from their Avon Valleys raptor work to get to grips with some smaller stuff. We met at 7:30 and set the following nets:
As ever, the first bird out of the nets was a Wren! It is astonishing just how often that is the case. I might have to do the statistics on that! The first round proper had a promising 12 birds, including another five Long-tailed Tits. It has been quite a month for this species: our third best catch since 2013. A quick analysis of the catches shows that October is “the month” for Long-tailed Tits in the Braydon Forest, with more than double the number caught in any other month:
Unusually, the catch of Long-tailed Tits did not include a single retrap.
The catch was largely what I expected. I did put on lures for both Redwing and Lesser Redpoll. They were both more in hope than expectation. The Firs has always been our poorest site for these two species in the Forest. Only 43 Redwing have ever been caught in the Firs since August 2012, and only one has ever been caught in October previously, in 2021. So to catch one this morning was a bit of a bonus.
Lesser Redpoll are caught even less often, with only four ever caught inside the Firs: two in November 2016 and two in February 2022. So not catching one in this session was not a surprise. Just across the road, in Webb’s Wood, where our ringing site is about 600m away from our Firs site, the last three years have seen it become the main site for our Lesser Redpoll catches. Hopefully they will spill over into the Firs. As posted for Thursday’s session, we caught our first two of the winter there that day. It will be interesting to see if they spread across Wood Lane into the Firs.
The session was reasonably busy, with birds in every round, and the catch was as follows: Blue Tit 7(8); Great Tit 4(3); Long-tailed Tit 7; Wren 2(1); Robin 2(1); Redwing 1; Blackbird (1); Chiffchaff 1; Goldcrest 2; Bullfinch 1. Totals: 27 birds ringed from 9 species and 14 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 41 birds processed from 10 species.
It was a very pleasant session, even if it was Blue Tit heavy. Interestingly, a Blue Tit that we ringed on Thursday, BFF1788, was recaptured at the Firs in this session just two days later. In my analysis of movements of titmice within the Braydon Forest, that is the only regular movement: between the Firs and Webb’s Wood. Is 600m a “significant movement”?
The juvenile female Bullfinch was everyone’s favourite bird of the morning. During the course of the session we were joined by a cyclist who stopped off to chat. He had started out from Swindon, was heading towards Malmesbury, before going on to Cirencester, then back to Swindon. Sounds too much like hard work to me! Later we had a group join us on the site looking for fungi. The group leader said that he had been to all of the other woods in the Forest but that none of them compared to the Firs. He also said that, despite them all carrying baskets, they would only be taking the odd representative specimen. All I can say is that they were still there and still collecting when we left.
We emptied and shut the nets at 11:45, processed the last eight birds and then took down, leaving site at about 12:30.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 