With Wednesday being blown away by astonishingly strong winds, I was a bit worried about the forecast for this morning. It was for it to be 12 to 14mph, with gusts to 20mph, between 7:00 and 10:00. That was to be followed with base winds of 15 to 20mph and gusting to 29 to 35mph. Unfortunately, they got it absolutely correct and we had to start shutting the nets at 10:30. By then we had caught a decent number of birds, with good variety and a few top catches for this winter.
I was joined for the morning by Steph for the first time for a long time (with daughter Bea and, later, hubby Stuart), Claire, also for the first time for an age, Pete, then Laura and Adam arrived, later than the others as arranged, as they had to make their way back from a family Christmas in Winchester (hubby Mark arrived about 9:00) and, by the time my new friend Ralph turned up with his Mum and his Grandad (see the last Somerford Common West blog piece), it seemed like quite a family affair!
Because of the size of the ringing team we had out, I decided to set some additional nets. We set the following:
It started well, the first bird in the nets, ride 2, before they were even opened, was a Marsh Tit. Not only that, it was a new one: number 39 for the year! We will be in the Firs on Wednesday: I am so hoping for number 40!
As soon as the nets were open the birds started piling in, and it was very busy for the two hours that we had them open. I went to extract a Great Tit from ride 5. Whilst doing that, I looked along to ride 6 and noticed a number of birds hitting the nets. Ride 6 is not one we use often but in that first round I extracted eight Long-tailed Tits and a Robin. However, the best bird I extracted from that ride was this:
Our first Redwing of the autumn! To put this into perspective, it has been our worst autumn / winter catch ever: 25 birds fewer than this time last year! We will need to catch six more in the Firs on Wednesday to equal our worst ever previous autumn / winter result.
The rest of the team were extracting from the nets around the feeding station. I got the better of the deal: no Blue Tits!
As I was walking back from those ride 6 extractions, a Blackbird flew into ride 5. This is the first Blackbird that we have ringed since the 9th October! That is quite an astonishing gap between catches. It is thirteen blank sessions since we caught one! We have ringed 33 so far this year, which is about average, but the longest gap we have had between catches.
The next good bird was this, we heard it call before it hit the net, Laura went after it straight away and extracted this noisy fellow:
They are always the noisiest birds we extract. If there was a long gap between Blackbirds ringed, it is trivial compared to the gap between Great Spotted Woodpeckers: 18 blank sessions. That said, this year we have had our biggest haul of the species since 2017, with 17 ringed so far. The best was 24 in 2017, and 19 in 2013. So our third best year for them. but front-loaded.
The list from the session was: Great Spotted Woodpecker 1; Blue Tit 27(7); Great Tit 2; Coal Tit 4(3); Marsh Tit 1(2); Long-tailed Tit 6(4); Robin 1(1); Redwing 1; Blackbird 1; Goldcrest 4. Totals: 48 birds ringed from 10 species and 17 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 65 birds processed from 10 species.
It is a shame that we had to close up early: I am pretty certain that we would have hit the 100 mark if we had kept going to midday. I am also pretty confident that we would have added some finches to the list. We did catch a male Chaffinch but, although its legs were not in bad condition, they looked as if they were beginning to show signs of Fringilla papillomavirus infection, so we erred on the side of caution, released it and cleaned up. On my way in, and on my way out again, I did see several small flocks of Redpoll which we do seem to catch post-11:00 at this site.
With everybody mucking in to help us take down, it did not take long to get everything put away, and we were off site by 11:30. It would be churlish to complain about the weather as, for once, the forecast was pretty well spot on. I hope we have the same next Wednesday for our fourth successive record year.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 