I met up with Dick and Mark at Westdown Camp this morning at 8:30 and we headed out to cover the south-west of the training area. It was certainly an interesting day: nearly everywhere you looked there were tanks, lorries, armoured cars, rocket launchers and soldiers! They had been on a major exercise for the last two weeks, i.e. since our last foray onto the Plain, and were now packing up and clearing away at the end of it before heading off to their home barracks area. I have to say, in that heat, in those uniforms and helmets, I didn’t envy them.
We had a busy session, and found quite a lot. The Barn Owl story is still very slow in developing this year. Today we checked on 11 Barn Owl boxes: thankfully, four of them contained adult Barn Owl pairs, but no eggs nor young in the boxes yet. Two boxes had Jackdaw nests in but they have fledged now, so we cleaned out the boxes and replenished them with wood shavings ready for Barn Owls to take up residence. It is a late start, but Barn Owls can breed late into the year, they often have two broods, so starting late is not such a big deal for them.
The saddest part of the Barn Owl boxes were the four that had been utilised by Stock Doves. That is a fairly standard occurrence. Two of the Stock Dove nests had healthy chicks, developing nicely, and should fledge within a couple of weeks. Another of the nests, however, had what was clearly a long dead adult (it was buried in the nesting material in the bottom of the box) and an infertile egg. The last Stock Dove occupied box had two predated adults in it. Their chest muscle had been picked clean. My thoughts are that they were predated by either Weasel or Stoat, Sparrowhawk / Goshawk would have made much more of a mess, as they rip their prey apart.
Now to the success stories of the afternoon: the Kestrels. We checked 16 Kestrel boxes and found four successful broods of Kestrel. The first brood were surprisingly small: just two small, downy chicks, but big enough to ring:
These were our smallest of the day. The next box had another two chicks to ring. These were a bit bigger:
At this stage they are a real handful: all beak and claws. We ringed four chicks in the next box. They were very close to fledging:
They were so close to fledging, in fact, so close that two of them flew from the box. Their flight isn’t that strong and we just monitored where they went, then Mark collected them and brought them back for ringing. When Dick put them back in the box it was done very carefully, controlling the access to the box, so that they didn’t panic and fly out again. Delighted to say that was totally successful.
The final Kestrel box with Kestrels in, actually didn’t. As we drove towards the tree within which it is sited we watched three juveniles fly off to trees elsewhere. There was one sat on the top of the box. We sat and watched until it also decided to follow its brood mates. So four broods, three ringed, comprising eight chicks. What is slightly weird is that each brood was at a later stage than the previous, from downy chicks just big enough to ring, to fully fledged and leaving the next box! Great script.
Alongside that, two of the boxes had Jackdaw nests, young probably fledged already, four had breeding pairs of Stock Dove in them and six of the boxes were empty.
Although Barn Owls are having a slow time of it, Kestrel are doing much better on the Plain: these eight ringed yesterday take the total of chicks ringed this season to 51!
We got back to Westdown Camp at about 15:45.
Postscript: Returning home after our pleasant day out on Salisbury Plain, as I got to Devizes a tyre pressure warning came on in the car. I stopped at the garage on the way out of town, pumped up the tyres, off-side front being the worst and headed for home. Just before the Bristol, Marlborough, Avebury roundabout on the A361 the front tyre deflated rapidly. I pulled into the bus stop layby and the tyre was as flat as a pancake. I couldn’t make head nor tail of the inflation kit, so called my friendly local recovery agent, who said he’d be there on 45 minutes. I looked at tyre shops that he could take me to to get a replacement, only to find that all, even Kwik-Fit, were shutting at 5.00, so no good. I canceled him and looked at mobile replacement services. I was just picking myself up from the floor at the price I had been quoted when a white van pulled in behind me. This guy climbed out, covered in tattoos and piercings and, in the broadest Wiltshire accent I have ever heard, asked “What’s the problem, mate?” I showed him and he said he would sort it for me. He tried the tyre inflation kit but the valve remover is plastic and it just broke. So he said he lived locally and would head home and come back with his tool kit . 10 minutes later he got back, took out the valve, squeezed in the tyre sealant and put on the compressor to pump up the tyre. Five minutes later it was still saying zero pressure in the tyre. We rolled the car along a bit and found a rather large hole: 4mm at least. “Don’t worry” he said, “I am a biker and repair these all the time, I just need some more kit”. He got on the phone and 6 minutes later his wife arrived with another box of tricks and a bottle of cold water for me, assuming I would need it having been stuck out in the sun all that time. Jan gets on with repairing the tyre, plugged the hole and sealed it. I said I would take it slowly on the way home, he said no need that repair will last as long as the tyre treads. He was right. He wouldn’t take anything for it and I am just awestruck that someone like that exists in this day and age: that there are two of them in a relationship is even better. I have insisted they let me take them out to dinner next week but I suspect it won’t happen as they just didn’t think they had done anything out of the ordinary.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 