The Wiltshire Wildlife Trust make a huge commitment to community engagement, particularly with their care farms for children and their wellbeing groups for adults. As it says on their website:
https://www.wiltshirewildlife.org/health
Occasionally some of the group activities coincide with my ringing sessions, and I am always happy to spend time with the groups, show what we do and explain why we do it. The other thing that I offer is for members of the group to get bitten by a Blue Tit, sorry, I meant, to learn how to safely hold and release a bird! Today I had arranged with the Swindon Wellbeing Group for them to join us for a while at Somerford Common.
I was joined for the session by Laura at 8:00 and we set the usual nets, which were opened by 9:00. You can see the set up on the post from the 4th January session. The weather was interesting: it started warm and misty, to the point that we were shedding layers of clothing but, as the morning went on, the fog got thicker and the temperature dropped considerably and we were wrapped up warm by the end of the session.
The first birds arrived at 9:15: an hour and three quarters before the Wellbeing Group arrived! Actually, in the interim we were joined by Rob, his wife and their three month old baby. Rob had been out ringing with me a couple of years ago, until work got in the way. We have stayed in touch and, hopefully he will be able to resume ringing at some time in the future.
It was a smallish catch, but we did have nine species in the tally. The highlight had to be a couple of Great Spotted Woodpeckers: a male to be ringed and a female retrap.
The Wellbeing group arrived bang on 11:00 and I ran through my usual profile of the ringing scheme, peppered with some examples of how the data from ringing is used. We had a decent number of birds for them to look at, good variety, and everyone who wanted to had the opportunity to hold and release a bird. The man who got to release the Great Spotted Woodpecker was particularly happy with the opportunity. In fact, only one of the group decided that they didn’t want to do so. They came with Laura and me to see our net set up and watched whilst we extracted birds from the nets. It is not something that I do often, showing the nets with birds in them, or extractions: it tends to be the part of the process that can upset the onlookers but, fortunately, the group were interested and positive about what we were doing, and all of the extractions were nice and straightforward.
As expected with the bird feeders in place, the session was titmouse heavy. However, the catch size is actually on a par with how they were back in October / November before I set up the feeders. I thought it might be interesting to look at the catch sizes, the numbers of titmice in those catches and what proportion of the catch they made.
My reading of this is that the provision of the feeding station has had a minimal impact on the catches we have made. The first catch with the feeding station in place, 14th December 2024, was on a par with the previous three catches. The subsequent two have been somewhat smaller. Was today’s catch, being the smallest, due to the impact of the recent bad weather? It is possible, but the weights of the individuals caught were on a par with what I would expect. Blue Tits between 10g and 12g (although one was 8.9g, it was the only one sub 10g), the Great Tits were all between 17g and 20g.
The catch was: Great Spotted Woodpecker 1(1); Blue Tit 11(8); Great Tit 3(3); Coal Tit 1(2); Marsh Tit (2); Wren 1; Robin (1); Blackbird 1; Chaffinch 1. Totals: 19 birds ringed from 7 species and 17 birds retrapped from 6 species, making 36 birds processed from 9 species.
Laura and I closed the nets at 12:15 and took down. We were away from site by 12:50 after a quiet, but enjoyable, session.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 