What a calamitous way to start a session! Firstly, I missed two emails from Claire yesterday evening. She was planning to come along, but hadn’t been there before and asked for a pin to where we would be. When I didn’t reply, because somehow I didn’t see it, she assumed that the session wasn’t going ahead. So that left myself and Pete to carry out the session.
We set fewer nets than usual: the T-net set up: one each of 9m, 12m and 18m and then, along the back tree line, two x 18m and 1 x 9m. However, we had a nightmare with the T-net set up: it took us an hour to sort it all out! Cue some pretty ripe language from yours truly. The other reason we set fewer nets, with the temperature scheduled to hit 29oC, I wanted them to be out of the sun to minimise any prospect of heat stress for the birds. For the same reason, we made sure that the ringing station was well out of the sun for the entire session.
Then we started catching birds. Well, catching is a bit of an exaggeration: we ended up with just 14 birds from nine species! However, for Pete, he got to ring his first ever House Sparrow and, later in the morning, his first Magpie:
So two new for him was joyous, but the reason for the title of this blog piece is that, 20 minutes later, we caught a second! Prior to today we had caught and ringed a total of 11 Magpies since I took on the ringing in the Braydon Forest. We have caught two in a session on two other occasions: the first was in October 2016, on the opposite side of the site, the second was in May 2020, at Blakehill Farm West. In fact, of the 13 we have now caught, nine of them have been caught at Blakehill Farm.
The list for the morning was: Magpie 2; Great Tit (1); Wren 1; Dunnock (1); Robin 1[2](1); Blackbird [2]; Blackcap 1; Goldfinch 1; House Sparrow 1. Totals: 7 adults ringed from 6 species, 4 juveniles ringed from 2 species and 3 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 14 birds processed from 9 species. Not a bad variety from such a small catch.
It was a very pleasant morning to be out. Arriving on site the first bird I saw was a male Stonechat. It is only in the last couple of years since we, and Robin Griffiths and his monitoring team, have found evidence of them breeding at Blakehill Farm.
That was followed by sight of a dozen and more Skylark on the edge of the plateau. During the morning we had Buzzards, Red Kites and a Sparrowhawk taking advantage of the thermals to soar over the plateau area. Also, and the most hopeful sign, a calling Curlew! Hopefully, one day, we will find some well grown chicks!
We had a visit from a lovely elderly couple who were very interested in what we were doing, Fortunately, it coincided with our catching three birds, so we actually had something to show them, explain about the ringing scheme, why we do it and how it benefits our birdlife.
Pete and I shut the nets and took down at 11:30 and were off site soon after midday. It was a small but curiously satisfying session.
Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond 