Autumn is definitely arriving early this year:
You can tell when the autumn berries and fruits are beginning to ripen: bird poop stains your hands purple. Today’s was the first I have had this year: it came from an adult female Blackcap. Her brood patch is just about ready to feather over and her wings and tail were already well advanced in their moult, so her breeding season is over. She will now be stuffing herself on berries and drupes to put on fat for her winter migration. Time to start looking at the fat deposition rates on migratory birds.
I had hoped to do the northern part of the wood but, as I was working solo, I decided to stick to the usual area, with my usual nets. Whilst putting them up I did manage to drop one of the nets onto a floor full of leaf litter, twigs, bramble cuts offs and a whole heap of other detritus. So, in the intervening time between rounds, I spent many minutes removing aforesaid detritus, and my lovely wife finished the job for me this afternoon!
Once upon a time, I would not have thought twice about working solo in that area, but it is very open, and the nets are set along the main paths for a lot of the way. Back in July 2020, soon after the Covid restrictions were lifted, I had a deeply unpleasant experience, with two women ignoring all of my signs, trashing one of my nets to get a Blackbird out and then having the gall to complain to the BTO that I had ranted and raved at them and threatened them with a machete. Fortunately, I had two independent witnesses to the fact that they were lying through their teeth about everything. Unfortunately, the BTO complaints team refused to accept their statements! If it hadn’t been for the police stepping in things might have gone badly wrong for me. However, it has had a long-term negative influence on my confidence of working solo in an open area.
Anyway, back to today. I was on site by 6:30, nets open by 7:30, nothing caught until 8:20. It didn’t get much better: just the odd bird every half-hour or so. Still, the weather was nice, I was there, lots of people stopped for a chat and were very friendly (well – apart from the one woman who shouted at me as I was setting my nets “You do this far too effing often!”, I just suggested she keep her dog on its lead and to make sure it came nowhere near me. I didn’t specify why not. Now, where did I put that machete? A joke based on the previously mentioned incident.)
I was in the wood, relaxing, until I decided to pack up at 11:30. I closed the least productive ride, then checked the others and processed the bird that was in the end one. I then took the closed ride down and packed it away and checked the other side (rides 2 and 3 if you have one of the previous diagrams). From there I removed another Robin and two juvenile Bullfinches. Nice to have the Bullfinches again. Anyway, after processing them, those last rides were also empty, so they were shut and taken down. What with all of the nattering with passers by, I didn’t get everything packed away until 13:20, with just 13 birds processed: Wren (1); Dunnock 1; Robin [4](1); Blackcap 1[2]; Chiffchaff (1); Bullfinch [2]. Totals: 2 adults ringed from 2 species, 8 juveniles processed from 3 species and 3 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 13 birds processed from 6 species.
It was a lovely morning, if less productive than I would like. The silence of the wood was regularly interrupted by the calls of juvenile Buzzards demanding food, and also quite a lot of Nuthatch calling within the wood: a shame we didn’t catch any.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 