A funny session this morning, as in “funny peculiar” not “funny ha-ha”. I was joined by Miranda and Ellie at 6:30am and we set the following nets:
With Ellie not yet started on extracting I didn’t set all of the nets I might usually do, but did add the 6m net to the 18m on the main path. In anticipation of today’s session, I had dropped in on Monday afternoon to top up the feeders. When we arrived this morning both feeders adjacent to ride 3 were empty and the seed feeder adjacent to ride 2 was empty but the peanut feeder was still three-quarters full.
When ringing this site with the seed feeders in place, we almost always take 70% of our catch in ride 3, 20% in ride 2, with the rest spread between 1, 4 and (missing today) 5. So, the first oddity today was that, despite the feeders having been emptied, we didn’t catch a single bird in ride 3 until our penultimate round at 10:50. In fact, ride 1 caught the majority of the birds. That led to the second oddity: because we could see everything that was going on in ride 1 we didn’t really do net rounds as such. When a bird hit the net we would go and extract it, just checking on the other nets as we went, so some of our “rounds” were 10 minutes apart, often just with one bird. We were wondering what could have caused the drop off in ride 3. Miranda’s suggestion was that perhaps a Sparrowhawk has added the ride to its hunting corridors. What gave that some credence was that we recovered a Blue Tit that, although it was alive and feisty, had clearly been attacked by something recently. Its head was scarred and feathers matted with dried blood, there was also dried blood on the tail and one of the thighs. Apart from its obvious recent ill fortune, it was still in good condition and very mobile, so I chose to ring it. Hopefully we will retrap it next time we are there and check on its progress. If it has been a sick bird I would not have ringed it but, having survived an attack from an external source, and still acting as every other Blue Tit does when being handled, I thought it worth the 26p ring!
The third oddity actually concerned the ubiquitous Blue Tits! Firstly, they were not the largest part of the catch, that was Great Tit! Not only that, we had twice as many Great as Blue Tits. The numbers weren’t huge: six and 12 but, surprisingly, the Blue Tits were all unringed birds, whereas the Great Tits were seven unringed and five retraps. Our normal ratio is 66:34 Blue Tit to Great Tit.
The list for the day was: Nuthatch (1); Blue Tit 6; Great Tit 7(5); Coal Tit 1(1); Marsh Tit (1); Long-tailed Tit 1; Wren 2; Dunnock (1); Chiffchaff 1; Chaffinch 2. Totals: 20 birds ringed from 7 species and 9 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 29 birds processed from 10 species.
With Miranda needing to leave by 11:30, we closed the nets at 11:10, took down and packed away, Miranda leaving when she needed to and Ellie and I cleared the site by 11:45. It was an interesting morning. Not being rushed gave Ellie a chance to ring and process birds without any pressure, and time for me to spend time showing her about extracting. There were some seriously tangled birds this morning: but I don’t think they put her off. I haven’t dumped her into the bitey hell that is extracting Blue Tits just yet. I am hoping we will have some friendlier species for her to start on in the near future: Blackcaps in particular. Great birds for introducing new trainees to extracting!
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 