We were scheduled to go to Ravensroost Meadows this morning but the weather forecast was for there to be a gusting breeze from the north-east, getting stronger throughout the morning, until reaching 20mph by 10:00. That is far too windy for an open site like Ravensroost Meadows. Although it was next on the rota, it was with some trepidation that I decided to go to Webb’s Wood. My last visit to Webb’s Wood, on 14th March, was hugely disappointing. Despite having the feeding station still in operation, and all of the usual nets set up, in four hours I caught just nine birds: four new, five retraps and nothing overly exciting in the mix.
As I was being joined by Miranda, Laura and Ellie for the session, I was rather concerned that we didn’t have a similar poor result. I decided to take a chance and completely ignore our usual net rides and try out somewhere that I hadn’t tried for a long while. It was a bit of a gamble: our average April catch at Webb’s Wood in April is just 21 birds from 8 species. In the diagram below, the red circle is where we usually have our ringing station, the white one is where we set up today:
We met at 6:30 and set the following nets:
While Laura, Miranda and Ellie were setting rides 1 and 2, I was strimming down the border along which we then set net rides 3 and 4. It was a gamble we were taking but it started paying off straight away. It was never massively busy, but we caught regularly, with rides 3 and 4 being where we caught the five Blackcaps we had this morning, along with a number of other birds, so that certainly paid off. In fact, all four rides gave a reasonable return on our investment.
There were some good results, alongside the Blackcaps. We ringed our tenth Braydon Forest Marsh Tit of the year this morning: a second calendar year female. Given how poor Webb’s has been for the species in the past, it is encouraging to see how the population has grown since Forestry England thinned the beechwood and started removing the foreign conifers from the site. Across the Braydon Forest we rarely catch and ring more than one bird per month in the first four months of the year. Until this year, the average between 2014 and 2024 was just 3 Marsh Tits ringed in the first third of the year. We still have three weeks and several sessions to go to improve even further.
My favourite bird of the morning, though, was the last bird out of the nets:
Looking at the head, above the beak, is a four-pronged pollen horn. A definite messy eater!
The catch for the session was: Nuthatch 1; Blue Tit 6(2); Great Tit 3; Coal Tit 2; Marsh Tit 1; Long-tailed Tit 2; Wren 4; Robin 1(2); Blackcap 5; Chiffchaff 2; Goldcrest 1. Totals: 28 birds ringed from 11 species and 4 birds retrapped from 2 species. So this catch was well above average for Webb’s Wood at this time of year.
The weather was good: sunny and bright. It warmed up quickly from a bracing 0oC when we got to the wood, until about 10:00, when it reached a balmy 14oC. The woodland managed to keep the worst of the wind off the nets until about 11:00, when the nets started to billow, so we closed them and took down at 11:15, taking a couple more birds out of the net as we did so. We had everything packed away and were off-site just before midday, after a much better session than usual for this site at this time of year.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 