I cancelled Saturday’s session in Ravensroost due to a weather forecast that said wet and windy all morning. Waking at 6:15 to find it was raining, I thought “back to bed”. When I woke again at 8:00 it was dry, bright and calm: that is, the weather was, I in a foul mood. Still, I had agreed to run a session for the Chippenham Men’s Mental Health Group on Monday and Ravensroost is the best place to carry that out, so we rescheduled for today.
I was joined for the session by Laura, David and Ellie. We arranged to meet at 7:45, as the weather was still forecasting rain until 7:00, having thrown it down pretty much all day Sunday. I set my alarm for 7:00. At 6:10 my good lady wife woke me up asking if I had cancelled the session. According to her clock it was 7:20. Cue panic from me! I dashed into the kitchen to find the clock showing 6:10! Something untoward had happened to her clock! I dozed for the next half-hour but no more sleep.
Fortunately, when I left the house at 7:30, although there was still a lot of damp in the air, it wasn’t raining. Of course, things could not run totally smoothly: I arrived at the site 10 minutes early, but spent the next 15 minutes trying to get the padlock open. Unlike every other Wiltshire Wildlife Trust site, somebody replaced the standard padlock, all opened by a single key, with a combination padlock. It has been a pain since it was installed: frequently seizing up. In the summer it was sap or syrup from some bushes and fruits, this winter goodness knows. Eventually some liberal spraying of WD40 and some brute force with a pair of pliers did the trick! I understand the Trust are going to replace it with a standard Padlock: the sooner the better!
Anyway, I had filled the feeders on Friday, in anticipation of Saturday’s session. They were empty on arrival so we refilled them. It did, of course, indicate that we would be enjoying the attention of Blue and Great Tits. As you can probably guess from the title. we were not “disappointed”! However, the first bird out of the nets was a titmouse: a new Marsh Tit, our fourth already this year.
We set our usual nets and waited for the deluge: we didn’t have to wait long. It was a very busy morning, so I was pleased that there were the four of us to manage the load.
We had some very decent birds in the catch, the best of the lot was this beauty:
The Chippenham group arrived at 10:45, just in time to see the Sparrowhawk processed. Because none of my team, apart from me, had ever ringed a Sparrowhawk, I got them to draw lots for it: Laura won and had the wonderful experience of being spiked by those fabulous talons! They are their killing tool and require careful handling. We sexed it based on the biometric data: females are considerably larger than males. So much so that the females take a larger ring size, so it is important to get the sexing correct!
As well as this, we ringed our first two Dunnock of the year, and retrapped our third.
The Chippenham crew were good company, and very interested in the details of the ringing scheme. We managed to show them how we catch and extract a variety of birds, together with every bit of the process. As we had a large number of birds to process, after I thought they had seen all of the potential variety, the group leaders and I suggested they head off for a walk, so they didn’t get bored. We then cracked on with processing the last forty birds. Fortunately, David’s dad, Trevor, had turned up to help us pack up and take David home afterwards. He very kindly took on a lot of the scribing: doing B-rings and retraps, whilst I scribed A-rings and processed a chunk of the remaining.
The list for the day was: Sparrowhawk 1; Nuthatch 1; Blue Tit 45(14); Great Tit 8(13); Coal Tit 1; Marsh Tit 1(2); Long-tailed Tit 1(1); Wren 1; Dunnock 2(1); Robin 3. Totals: 64 birds ringed from 10 species and 31 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 95 birds processed from 10 species.
We shut the nets whilst doing the last round, so we didn’t catch any more birds. By the time we had processed that lot it was gone midday. However, we split into two teams and got the nets down quickly. We were off-site by 13:00 after a busy Blue Tit heavy session.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 