Back to the plateau at Blakehill Farm to see whether we have any more migrants coming through. Without the hedgerow to help, as it was laid last winter and is beginning its grow back, but it will take a year or so before it becomes productive again, the catch can be very hit and miss. Last session, on the 11th August, we were happy with a good catch of Whitethroat, Lesser Whitethroat and Stonechat. We did see a couple of Meadow Pipit but didn’t catch them.
Once again, today we set our Mipit triangle, and I will keep doing do so until we find that they have arrived and we start catching them. I was joined by David, Laura and Adam, with Daniel and, later on, Mark and Trevor to help with the packing up and general chatting in between rounds. We set the following nets:
I have had a chat with Jonathan, the farm manager, and he has agreed that, on the days that we are going to be ringing out on the plateau, they will use their GPS management system to keep the cattle away from our ringing area. The yellow lines indicate the boundary for when we are on site. I selected it so that we were not cutting off access to any of the water troughs.
We started with three birds: a Wren and two Whitethroats. Our next round produced four of these beauties:
Essentially, we caught 14 birds in the first hour and another five in the next three hours before we decided to pack up and go home. Once again, no Meadow Pipits in the nets yet, but a couple flying around.
The list for the session was: Blue Tit [2]; Great Tit [1]; Wren (1); Whinchat [4]; Whitethroat 1[3](3); Lesser Whitethroat [1]; Chiffchaff [1]; Willow Warbler [1]; Greenfinch [1]. Totals: 1 adult ringed, 14 juveniles ringed from 8 species and 4 birds recaptured from 2 species, making 19 birds processed from 9 species.
So, one bird fewer than our last session on the 11th, but better variety: nine species processed against five. Both of these sessions have been interesting for differing reasons.
With the exception of a single bird caught in the Ravensroost Meadows area in September 2018, we have only ever caught Whinchat at Blakehill Farm, and those were all on the plateau. We have had some good years, notably 2018 (15), 2020 (10) and 2021 (12). Both 2022 and 2023 were blank, but 2024 had four, caught in September and now we have four caught in August. This is only the third time we have caught them in August, the others were in 2015 and 2020. The most we have ever caught was 15 in 2018, fingers crossed for something similar this year.
The most unusual bird caught was the Greenfinch. We caught four back in 2016 and one in 2020, but they were all caught along the perimeter track hedgerow, today’s was the first that we have caught on the plateau.
The number of Whitethroat continues to grow: we have now processed 29 this year so far in the Braydon Forest: 23 ringed and 6 retrapped. Our best year ever, and Blakehill is certainly adding to that, with 13 ringed and 3 retrapped already.
Anyway, we checked the nets regularly until midday when we shut up shop and went home. A satisfactory session: more birds would have been good, but the variety again helped make up for it. Daniel and Adam got to process their first ever Whinchat, Laura her second and David his third. Laura also got to process her first Greenfinch. I think they were relatively happy with that outcome.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 