Our first visit to the wood since July: I am not quite sure why. It is not as though we had to cancel any sessions there, I just didn’t schedule them for some reason. Our next session there will not be until the 20th December, but that is because the wood is closed for some extensive forestry work for the next six weeks. It was locked up when we arrived, but with the standard Wildlife Trust padlock, for which I have a key. I knew we would be able to get in, as this had been scheduled with the Trust management a long time ago, and confirmed last week.
There are huge signs everywhere: in the car park, on every entrance way, saying that the reserve is closed to the public from yesterday evening – but that still didn’t stop at least one couple encroaching with their dog which, obviously, wasn’t on a lead, despite all of the signs asking people to keep their dogs on a lead! I will be interested to see what we will find when we get back in there after the works are completed.
Anyway, I was joined for the morning by David, Laura, Adam and, for the first time, Peter. Peter was an attendee at one of my ringing demos at Blakehill Farm and make contact afterwards. He is a lapsed C-permit holder from several decades ago, but seemed to pick up pretty quickly. We all met at 7:00 and set up our nets. The coppicing this winter has taken away our usual feeding station so when I went to set them up on Thursday I had to change things a bit. We set the following nets:
The white hatching is the area that has been coppiced. The red dots are where the feeders were positioned: one seed feeder and one peanut feeder for nets 1, and then between nets 3 and 4.
The nets were open by 8:00 and we started catching straight away. Our first round produced and 25th Marsh Tit to be ringed this year, plus a retrap ringed in Ravensroost in the Spring. We had good catches until 10:30, when it died off a bit. Our plan was always to pack up at 11:30, so we started to close the nets at that time. The obligatory Blue Tit flew in as we were closing net ride 1, the last bird of the morning.
Our 10:30 session delivered another of these:
Our 26th of the year. The best ever haul in the Braydon Forest was 28 in 2017, followed by 27 in 2019. At this juncture it is likely that we will pass the 30 bird mark by the end of the year. All three caught this morning were juvenile birds.
As one would expect, with feeding stations in action, the catch was Blue and Great Tit heavy, but we still had a decent spread of species. We didn’t catch any Great Spotted Woodpecker or Nuthatch but the Goldcrests arrived at 9:30, always nice to find. Although our numbers in Ravensroost have fallen away over the years.
My highlight was, obviously, the Marsh Tits. However, for the team it was a lovely juvenile male Chaffinch, with nice clean legs, so we could ring it, picked up in our second round. That was followed by two more Redpoll, only our fourth and fifth of the autumn, in our third round. I think everybody was happy with the session.
The list for the session was: Blue Tit 9(5); Great Tit 6(5); Coal Tit 2(2); Marsh Tit 2(1); Wren 1; Robin 4(2); Goldcrest 4; Chaffinch 1; Redpoll 2. Totals: 31 birds ringed from 9 species and 15 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 46 birds processed from 9 species.
We had everything packed away by 12:15. As I will not be able to get in to top up the feeders for six weeks, at the end of the session we collected them up and I went over to Somerford Common to set them up there. To my astonishment, the entire shrubbery area around our feeding station site has been cleared, leaving our little island of trees and the one next to it! The rest has been cleared. It is a little surprising, given that it was done only four years ago. Perhaps that is the plan: a quarter of the paddock area cleared, apart from the tree stands, every four years. It will be interesting to see if that concentrates the birds in that small area or if they avoid it, because it is so open all around. I will be setting up the remaining feeding stations on Monday.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 