I was joined this morning by Laura, Miranda and Ellie. We met at 6:30, set the usual nets and had them open by 7:20: quite quick for us. Unfortunately, the session was as quiet as most recent ones.
Equally unfortunately, I was rather unwell and spent most of the morning just sitting down and being a bit out of it all. This meant that I missed the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust Volunteers barbecue. It was a talk on the work that will be carried out at Lower Moor Farm to provide suitable habitat for Snipe and other small waders, by a process of forming a scrape and rewetting the area around it. The whole thing sounds extremely promising. Miranda left us at 10:50 for the meeting at 11:00 and filled me in on the details later.
We had one of those sessions where we caught a few birds in every round. What was of note were the proportion of Blackcaps. The list for the session was: Treecreeper 1; Wren (1); Dunnock (1); Robin 3(1); Blackbird (1); Blackcap 17; Chiffchaff 1. Totals: 22 birds ringed from 4 species and 3 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 25 birds processed from 7 species. All birds ringed and retrapped were birds that fledged this breeding season.
We took down at 12:00 and were off site by 12:45. It is always hit and miss at this site in September: this was very much a miss.