Red Lodge: Monday, 23rd December 2024

Due to the weather of the last few weeks, and my aversion to being in woodlands when the wind is blowing at 40+ mph, I haven’t got around to setting up a feeding station at all of my sites, and that includes Red Lodge. I scheduled to go there today, so I was going to get an opportunity to see the impact or otherwise of setting up a feeding station. The list for Red Lodge in December 2023 was: Treecreeper 1; Blue Tit 27(3); Great Tit 15(7); Coal Tit 2; Long-tailed Tit 1(1); Robin 1; Goldcrest 1; Chaffinch 2. Totals: 50 birds ringed from 8 species and 11 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 61 birds processed from 8 species. That is pretty typical for most Decembers: ranging from 45 to 101 birds processed.

I was joined for the morning by Sarah, Laura, Adam and Daniel, we met at 7:45 and we set the following nets:

Set 5 is where I will set up the feeding station before the next session – promise! Our first bird was, entirely predictably, a Wren. It came out of ride 1 before it was fully opened. I haven’t done the analysis but I am pretty confident that the first bird out of the net is a Wren on well over 50% of our sessions.

It was very quiet: between opening the nets and 10:00 we caught only six birds: two each of Goldcrest and Long-tailed Tit, one each of Wren and Robin. Then, at 10:10, we had a decent haul of eleven birds: all bar one in net 4. Unfortunately, it them dropped away again and I decided to call an early halt at 11:30. Naturally, there was one last bird in the net: a Goldcrest.

The list for the session was: Blue Tit 3(1); Great Tit 1(1); Long-tailed Tit 6; Wren 1(1); Robin (2); Goldcrest 4(1). Totals: 15 birds ringed from 5 species and 6 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 21 birds processed from 6 species.

When you contrast that with the 2023 result, the difference is primarily in the numbers of Blue and Great Tits. This then begs the question: do I need to put up supplementary feeding stations if all that is doing is helping Blue and Great Tit numbers: two species that are really not in need of help in maintaining their populations? Or do I need to provide the feeding on the off chance of catching the occasional finch? Something t0 ponder over the turkey, pudding, cakes and mince pies over the next few days!