I have spent the last couple of years working in the southernmost end of Ravensroost Wood, as there has been a fair amount of forestry management going on in the north end of the wood. I have decided that I need to start working back through the wood to see what impact, if any, this work has had on the catchable population. It can go one of two ways: the Firs and Webb’s Wood have shown a superb recovery after their thinning and management works: more birds from more species, recovery within two years of the work. Red Lodge, not so good: it took a lot longer to recover and numbers are still down on what they were before the thinning started. However, we do catch a few more finches than we used to.
With it being just myself and David today, I decided to keep things as manageable as possible. We met at 5:30 and we set a fairly compact net ride system:
The black line across the end of ride 4 is where blocked off access, tying up the gate and putting a “No Access” sign. These rides are all nets we have used successfully before, so I was hopeful of a decent catch. Unfortunately, hope is often misplaced. It wasn’t just slow, it was glacial! We had the nets open by 6:15 and sat and waited, and waited. The first bird was caught at 8:30: it was a Robin. Our next catch arrived at 9:35: two Juvenile Blue Tits. Following that, our hopes were raised again, by a catch of nine birds: Blue Tit, Nuthatch, Treecreeper and six juvenile Willow Warblers. After that, nothing until we decided we had been there long enough. I started taking down ride 1, whilst David was shutting the other rides and extracted our 13th bird of the morning: our 17th Marsh Tit of the year! Their numbers are going well and staying ahead of last year! Another three this month, which has been our standard for the last three years, and we will be three ahead of last year’s tally.
However, the six juvenile Willow Warblers is our best single autumn catch of the species at any of our sites.
The list for the session was: Treecreeper 1; Nuthatch [1]; Blue Tit [3]; Marsh Tit [1]; Robin 1; Willow Warbler [6]. Totals: 2 adults ringed from 2 species and 11 juveniles ringed from 6 species.
Certainly not our best by any stretch, but not our worst! We were packed up and away by noon. Our next session at the Wood will be down by the two ponds at the top (north) end of the wood, hopefully with a better result.