After Sunday’s less than successful visit to Blakehill Farm, followed by five hours on Monday removing leaves from my nets, I wanted to go somewhere today where there were nearly no Oak trees to drop their leaves and twigs into my nets. That didn’t give me many choices. I had a look at the visit data for Lower Moor Farm. Surprisingly, the catch sizes for November are quite good: usually 40 or so birds and, even better, not masses of Blue or Great Tits. I decided to give it a go.
I was joined by Miranda for the session. My choice of nets was to use the CES set up, excluding the farthest net sets:
We met at 7:30 and set the nets. There were a few issues from when they were last put away, so it was 8:30 by the time we had them set. I really am going to have to have some net management training sessions for the team, I think.
The birds started arriving straight away: in the form of two Wrens who decided to fly into an unopened net. They are able to get themselves entangled perfectly well in properly set nets, in unopened nets they can be the very Devil. Fortunately, these were a little more angelic and a little less demonic than usual.
We had a steady throughflow of birds all morning. We also had a steady throughflow of visitors. Lower Moor Farm has a Care Farm educational facility to help children with issues, be they behavioural, social or educational. This morning we had the pleasure of their company, and that of their carers throughout the morning. I spent a lot of time explaining about bird ringing and what information it enables us to gather about individual birds and bird species. They were shown little things like how to age certain species and those that by now cannot be accurately aged (Long-tailed Tits were plentiful this morning), how to identify the different sexes in sexually dimorphic species (Goldcrests were also present in reasonable numbers). Those children that wanted to were shown how to safely handle small wild birds and release them back into the wild. It went well! There was also a pretty decent footfall of other visitors to the reserve, all of whom were interested in what we were doing.
Funnily enough, the capture of star bird of the morning coincided with the largest audience:
Juvenile male Sparrowhawk, Accipiter nisus
This is actually the first Sparrowhawk that my team has caught this year. To be fair, one a year is normal: in the last 11 years we have caught at least one each year, with two in three of those years, most recently in 2021. It was a huge hit with the audience, and I managed to get the bird processed with minimal damage (to my fingers, the bird was never in any danger).
The list for the session was: Sparrowhawk 1; Blue Tit 5(2); Long-tailed Tit 2(10); Wren 5(2); Dunnock 3(1); Robin 2(3); Redwing 3; Blackbird 1(1); Chiffchaff 4; Goldcrest 4(4); Goldfinch 1. Totals: 31 birds ringed from 11 species and 23 birds retrapped from 7 species, making 54 birds processed from 11 species.
There are some surprises in that list: not least the Chiffchaff catch. We caught a singleton in November three years ago but had never otherwise caught any in late autumn / winter time, catching four in November is very definitely unusual. We know that they do overwinter in the Cotswold Water Park but more centrally than Lower Moor Farm.
The Goldfinch was the first caught in November on this part of the site for seven years, and the first anywhere on the site for six years. Our Goldcrest catch takes us to the best year for the species in the whole of the complex, with at least one more session to come before the end of the year.
The weather was perfect for ringing. It started cold but very quickly warmed up to a very mild ambient temperature. The sun put in an appearance at about 10:00 and stayed around for the rest of the session. Miranda and I started taking down at about 11:45: emptying ride 1 then taking down the nets and processing the birds before doing the same to rides 2 and 3. As we kept catching birds whilst doing so, we ended up taking quite a bit longer to get packed away than normal, and finally left site at 13:15 after a thoroughly enjoyable session.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 