With just Ellie and myself available for this morning and, with Ellie so early in her ringing career, I decided not to overdo the number of nets, so we set just two rides of nets down the central glade: a total of 120m of netting.
We met at 6:30 and had the nets open by 7:15: pretty good timing for us. For once, all of the nets came out of the bags okay, no twists, no snags, no horrible “who the (bleep) did this?” moments! The first three birds hit the nets as we walked back to the ringing station: a Blackcap, Wren and Willow Warbler.
The weather was excellent: not breezy, sunny but not too hot and we just spent a very pleasant morning extracting and processing birds. To put that into context: I did a few birds when we had a busy second round with 10 birds to process, but I got Ellie to process the vast majority of what we caught. Vast is a bit over the top, given how many we actually caught, but it gave her the chance to get familiar with the key things we are looking for at this time of year.
For example, some species are able to be aged, but they are not obvious: Dunnock, for example. We caught two today: an adult and a second calendar year bird. The other key issue at present is the sexing of sexually monomorphic species: back to Dunnock. One is looking for two key things: for the females it is the development of a brood patch. There are five stages: defeathering; fully defeathered and blood vessels emerging; blood vessels engorged; blood vessels emptied and wrinkled; refeathering. Currently, we are seeing stage one on newly arrived migrants and some later breeding resident species and, just in the last week, plenty at stage two. I cannot say that we have seen any at stage three yet, but a couple of the birds we caught, particularly a female Blue Tit, weighed in so heavily that they had to be carrying eggs ready to start laying.
For males one is looking for a cloacal protuberance (CP). In the breeding season, the female cloaca slants downwards along the tail line, the male cloaca is perpendicular to the body wall. This astonishingly easy with Dunnocks: for size / proportion, the males have a very large, very obvious, CP. That is not the same for all but, generally, if you blow on the males belly the CP will wink at you! It gets difficult with those species where the male will also take part in brooding the eggs and young. In some small sexually monomorphic passerines, particularly with my two favourite warblers: the Lesser Whitethroat and the Garden Warbler, the males develop very decent sized brood patches, and being able to correctly identify the CP is key to accurate sexing.
We were active until 11:00, but the catch had died off significantly by then, with just one bird in the last round, so we shut the nets at 11:15 ready to take down.
The list for the session was: Treecreeper 1; Blue Tit 2(1); Long-tailed Tit 1; Wren 1(1); Dunnock (2); Song Thrush 1; Blackbird 1; Blackcap 7(1); Chiffchaff (1); Willow Warbler 2; Bullfinch 1. Totals: 17 birds ringed from 9 species and 6 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 23 birds processed from 11 species.
So not the biggest catch, but a decent variety, particularly for Ellie who could add her first Bullfinch, Treecreeper and Willow Warblers to her fledgling ringing career! For such a small wood it delivers a good variety and comparatively good numbers when compared with the other four woodlands that are so much bigger.
There was a lot of bird song there all morning. Both Nuthatch and Great Spotted Woodpecker were both busy, singing away in the former, drumming away, and the occasional yelp, with the latter. One of the more frustrating birds at the Firs is Green Woodpecker. There are always two males calling away either side of the wood, but not coming near. Hopefully, with the newly widened central glade, we might some ants colonising the area and attracting them in. In the meantime, I suspect that they are exploiting the two fields that flank the Firs.
With not a lot to pack away, we were off-site by 11:45, and I was home in time for an early lunch and snooker!
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 