Spring seems to have arrived in north Wiltshire. It started cold, as low as zero, but warmed up until by 9:30 the sun came out and it warmed up quickly. One thing that is clear: the winter feeding flocks have broken up. I will be removing the supplementary feeding stations next week. The feeders here were topped up on Monday, and showed there had been some activity but not enough to leave them up.
I was joined for the morning by Miranda, Laura, Ellie and Pete. It was just as well we had a big team: we didn’t have a big catch but I was worse than useless with a bad back (okay, I did a bit of setting up and taking down, but it hurt a lot, so I did none of the net rounds and the only bird I extracted was a Wren in the nets I was about to take down). We met at 6:30 and had the nets open just after 7:00 and started catching straight away – a Wren before we had got the nets open. We set the usual nets for the site: along the main paths, and a trio of 9m nets around the feeding station.
It was an interesting session, not a big catch but 12 species. We did go with the hope of catching Siskin and on our fourth check there she was:
The list for the session was: Great Spotted Woodpecker (1); Nuthatch 2; Treecreeper 2; Blue Tit 5(1); Great Tit 2(4); Coal Tit 2(2); Long-tailed Tit 3; Wren 2; Song Thrush 1; Blackbird 1; Goldcrest 2; Chaffinch 2(1); Siskin 1. Totals: 25 birds ringed from 12 species and 9 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 34 birds processed from 13 species.
One of the commonest complaints about our activities is that we stress the birds. Indeed, we did have a dog walker tell us this morning that, whilst she understood why we did it, the nets are wicked. All I can say is that a number of the birds processed by Laura, including the Siskin, were happy to sit on her hand until they decided to leave. I do have a lovely photo of a Blue Tit relaxing in the palm of her hand but, unfortunately, if I post it someone is bound to misrepresent it and make a complaint.
In the gaps between rounds we were treated to a display of Peacock, Comma and Brimstone butterflies plus a number of different bees all flying around a nearby Goat Willow. There was so much bird song around: lots of Chiffchaff calling. I was a little surprised we didn’t catch any, but we did have a lovely 5 minutes watching them flying around the top of the Goat Willow hunting for food. We had Raven and Buzzard flying around advertising their presence as well.
Anyway, as things had died off, we shut the nets and took down at 11:00 and were away from site by 11:45.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 