I was joined for the session by Rosie, George and the Childs family. We met at Blakehill Farm at 7:30 and set the following nets:
The plan was fairly straight forward: net rides 1 and 2 would be for catching the usual hedgerow species, with lures for a mix of those species. Net ride 3 was set up for Redwing, with a singular lure for that. The hedgerow there, under the Oak tree canopy, was full of rose hips, haws and sloes: just right for attracting in winter thrushes. We set the wader nets really just to test the possibility for a focused effort on catching them in the near future. (At least, that’s what I am going to claim.)
Rosie, George and Laura set ride 3 first and got the lure working, whilst Mark, Adam, Daniel and I set up ride 2. Then Rosie, Daniel and I went to set up the wader nets while the rest of the team set up ride 1. As we reached the edge of the pond where we planned to set the nets we were fortunate (very unfortunate) to see eight Snipe fly off and, as I got to the corner of the dog-leg on ride 5, a Jack Snipe took off and disappeared. Nice to know they are there: last year that area was too wet for the Snipe. Now I know that they are making use of it again there will be some pre-dawn net setting and, hopefully, the chance to ring a few. Unfortunately, they did not reappear this morning. We did catch two Robins in ride 5, but that was it.
Rosie got to extract and process the first bird of the morning, one of the wader pond Robins, before she and George had to head off to work with the Wildlife Trust. Almost as soon as we had the nets set it started to rain. It was very light, more like drops of mist than actual rain, but it stayed like that for the next two hours. Not only that, the breeze that was forecast to come from the north, came from the south west: pushing rides 1 and 2 into the hedgerow itself. The sky cleared at about 11:30 and the sun actually came out as we started to take down at midday.
To say it was a frustrating session would be an understatement. There were so many birds flying around: the hedgerow was abuzz with good numbers of birds, lots of calling, singing and movement, but they were all either on the wrong side of the net or on the top of the hedgerow. Ride 3 was just a waste of time: it caught one Wren. We had large flocks of Starling, Fieldfare, even a few Redwing, fly over, perch in the tops of the trees above the nets, only to either stay there or fly over without ever coming within catching distance of the nets. Even when the birds hit the nets, several of them managed to escape quickly. Perhaps the most frustrating was a beautiful male Stonechat who was sat in the net right up to the second I reached him, whereupon he struggled free and flew off. Fortunately, a little later Laura extracted a female Stonechat from the same net. This is our tenth of the year so far at Blakehill Farm, making it our best year for the species at this site. The previous best was seven in 2020.
The list for the session was: Blue Tit 1; Long-tailed Tit 3(2); Wren 1; Stonechat 1; Robin 3; Goldcrest 1; Reed Bunting 1. Totals: 11 birds ringed from 7 species and 2 birds retrapped from 1 species, making 13 birds processed from 7 species. The majority of the birds were caught in net ride 1.
I cannot pretend that it wasn’t a disappointing result: thank goodness for good company and chat. This part of the site, with the same nets set, can usually be relied upon to produce 30 or 40 birds in a session. We started closing the nets at 11:40, carefully extracting rides 1 and 2 from the hedgerows as we went. I have two nets to empty of several hundred Oak leaves when I have a couple of hours spare. It was 12:45 before we managed to get away from site.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 