In my write up of our session at Lower Moor Farm on Tuesday, 12th May, I noted that we had a retrapped Cetti’s Warbler, Cettia cetti. What I didn’t realise, until I received a query whilst entering the data into the online record system, as the ring number was not assigned to the West Wilts Ringing Group, that it was what we call a “control”. When I got the notification from the BTO later that day, the benefits of an online system, I was surprised by how far it had travelled.
As a much younger individual, in the early 1980’s I used to travel from Reading to spend the odd weekend at Portland Bill birding. We would go to Radipole Lake in Weymouth as the key place to see and hear Cetti’s Warbler. I saw my first in 1985. I knew they were spreading, as a couple of years later I saw one at the gravel pits to the west of Reading (Pingewood not Theale). However, they are still not renowned for moving around a lot.
Lower Moor Farm is the only place that my team catch Cetti’s. I caught my first in May 2015, having started ringing there in 2013. When I checked with the ringer who had covered the site for a decade or more, up until he gave the site up in 2011, he confirmed that he had never caught one there before. So it was a first for the site. Since then we have caught them in every year, some better than others. We can identify 10 territories between the car park and into our ringing site, just four of them within our area.
Anyway, we retrapped this bird on the 12th May and the report showed that it was ringed at the bird ringing factory called Icklesham, in the Rye Bay area of East Sussex on the 27th October 2024. It has travelled 201km WNW from where it was ringed in 562 days. I am not pretending that this is any sort of record for the species, the longest movement was 388km from Leighton Moss in Lancashire to my old stomping ground, Farlington Marshes, adjacent to my home city of Portsmouth. However, checking our records, prior to this recapture, the furthest distance any of ours travelled was 79km, most were 3 or 4km from the Cotswold Water Park. Bear in mind that prior to this latest we had only five previous controls.
Anyway, it tickled my fancy and I thought I would write it up!
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 