This heatwave is proving to be quite schizophrenic: the morning started cool at 4:30. It was overcast and very grey. The sun didn’t even begin to peep through until after we had packed up. I was joined for the morning, at 5:00, by Laura, Pete and Ellie. Ellie is just back from her three-month volunteer stint on Skokholm. I suspect that a few birds in a typical woodland doesn’t compare to ringing Manx Shearwater, Storm Petrel and Puffin! She is heading back at the end of August for the autumn migration.
We set the usual nets, and added on an extra 36m along the main drag. Our catches in Red Lodge in July have not been great: between 2015 and 2020 they averaged 30 birds per July session. Between 2021 and 2025 the average catch was just six per July session: four ringed and two retraps per session. That’s why we set the extra nets. The fact is that we did have a better than average catch. Still just the two retrapped birds: Nuthatch 1; Treecreeper [1]; Great Tit 1[2](1); Wren [3]; Robin [8](1); Blackbird 1[1]; Chiffchaff [1]. Totals: 3 birds ringed from 3 species, 16 juveniles ringed from 6 species and 2 birds retrapped from 2 species, making 21 birds processed from 7 species.
We are helping with a bio-blitz at Lower Moor Farm on Saturday, moth trapping Friday night for analysis Saturday morning. Hopefully we will have a better more interesting catch this weekend.
One very pleasant interlude, we met one Jon Beresford who was on-site doing a butterfly survey. Apparently the first one in Red Lodge for five years, as the previous surveyor had retired and nobody had taken it on until now. Like us, when we met he hadn’t had the best of luck, unlike our fabulous White Admirals and Silver-Washed Fritillaries at Webb’s Wood last Thursday. However, his fortunes did improve later in his walk when he managed to get this fabulous photograph:
The Braydon Forest is pretty good for butterflies and moths, my back garden, in the middle of Purton, also within the Forest boundaries, has delivered 467 species, including, at the time, a first for Wiltshire:
They were eradicated as a pest species in the early 20th century, last recorded in 1907, and not seen again until the 1950’s, with accidental reintroductions and some possible migrants from mainland Europe. Since then they have spread along southern coastal areas but, since my discovery of them in August 2012, they are now found quite regularly in Wiltshire. You used to have to notify their existence to MAFF, initially, and now DEFRA, but appreantly that is no longer the case.
Anyway, we shut the nets at 11:30 and took down and left site about 12:15. Always nice to have a good chat and catch up with Ellie about what she had seen and done on Skokholm. One good thing for her, not an opportunity much of the team get, she is now licensed to work with adult and pullus Manx Shearwater and Storm Petrel! She is one up on her trainer, although I have no species restriction on pulli of cliff-nesting or colony nesting seabirds, I don’t have the same for adults!