A better morning than recently at Lower Moor Farm and, for once, I got to do a decent amount of ringing. When I have two or more of my team out, I tend to scribe and ensure that the data I am being given is correct. If it is a large catch then I will join in the actual processing. This session I was joined by Ellie, and she had to leave at 10:30, so I spent the last couple of hours working and packing up solo. That was the quietest part of the morning, as the birds took shelter from the sun. We met at 5:30 and set the usual nets. The benefit of this site is that the rides are never in full sun and, apart from one ride, relatively wind proof, as well as having a decent amount of biodiversity.
We started catching straight away, and had a pretty reasonable set of net rounds. The best catch time was between 8:00 and 10:30, when Ellie left. After that I caught another seven birds. Annoyingly, the two rounds where I was closing the nets before taking down, the one at 12:00 produced two birds, who flew in as I was closing the nets they flew into, and a Robin, at 12:30, flew in after I had closed that net ride and actually whilst I was taking those nets down. Always great fun. Despite the potential for difficulty, he hadn’t grabbed too much net and came out very easily.
My favourite catch of the day was the unfairly much maligned Magpie:
This is only the second Magpie to be caught and ringed at this site. The first was caught 11 years ago, and was a juvenile. Ours was a second Calendar Year female undergoing her post-breeding moult. Just a note for the Magpie haters: there are just over 500k breeding pairs of Magpie in the UK, they have one brood per year normally of six chicks and the mortality rate of their chicks is estimated, from BTO data, at 80% over the first six months from fledging. There are at least 10 times as many breeding pairs of Blackbird, they can have up to four broods per year of, usually, four young. Their first six month mortality rate is 40%. It puts so-called Magpie nest predation into a different context, given that, in my opinion, over the course of a lifetime each pair of Blackbirds only needs to produce a total of four young to ensure population stability and some growth. Any data on this can be gleaned from the BTO’s BirdFacts database, which is free for the general public to use.
The list for the session was: Magpie 1; Blue Tit [4]; Great Tit [2]; Wren [3](1); Dunnock [3]; Robin [5]; Blackbird [1]; Blackcap [14]; Garden Warbler [6]; Whitethroat [2]; Chiffchaff [1]; Bullfinch (1). Totals: 1 adult ringed, 41 juveniles ringed from 11 species and 2 retraps from 2 species, making 44 birds processed from 12 species.
It has been our best year since 2021 for Garden Warbler. Their numbers fell off the cliff after that, with only three caught in each of 2024 and 2025. Our July catch of seven, so far, is the best we have had since July 2017. From 2020 until 2025 inclusive, we caught 2, 3, 3, 1,1,1 in the respective July totals. All seven caught this month have been juveniles: the best return since 16 in 2017. It will be interesting to see what next month brings, as we caught just one in 2022 and no juveniles since then and just one adult in 2025, none in the other years.
Equally, it has also been our best month for ringing Blackcaps since 2019, when we ringed 36, against 21 this month. Unsurprisingly, we ringed the highest total of juveniles in that year (34), with 16 ringed this month.
After Ellie left, I spent quite a lot of time showing children, and their parents, and a few passing, but interested, grown-ups, birds close up and explaining about the ringing scheme and the results it produces.
Unfortunately, dog-walkers were out in force, only a couple of them had their dogs under control. One couple, an elderly woman and, probably, her daughter, had a spaniel that decided to have a swim in Mallard Lake. I heard the ducks making a lot of alarming and said to them “this is a nature reserve, not a park, and your dog should be on a lead”. She shouted at me that she’d put it on a lead as soon as she got it back. Like it was my fault. She then spent 10 full minutes shouting at the beast, whilst it continued to disturb the birds, before it came back. So much for keeping it under close control. I don’t blame the dog, but the law needs to change so that dogs are only allowed off leads in the owner’s garden or in designated dog friendly places. Another couple came down, similar make up to the previous two, but this dog belonged to the younger woman. She was reading from the reserve leaflet, and they stopped by me, and she was talking about which way to go now according to the leaflet. I asked, very politely “Does that leaflet say anything about keeping you dog on a lead?”. To be fair, she was clearly embarrassed, apologised and put the dog on the lead. At least hers had been fully under control!
Anyway, I finally got everything packed away by 1:30 and headed home. As often happens, as I was packing away, the wind really got up. Fortunately, all of the nets had been closed by then, so I didn’t have to spend time extracting them from the Blackthorn and the brambles!