With the weather forecast for it to be cold early on, -1oC, I put the start time back to 7:30. It was considerably colder than forecast: -6oC, and, having woken up as if for a 7:00 start, I got the car running well in advance before leaving (sorry neighbours) and, for the first time, really appreciated having heated seats. It was very foggy, again, not forecast, and we had that fog until about 10:00 this morning.
I was joined by David, Laura and Adam – and Mark came along to help out with the grunt work. We set our usual nets and had them open by 8:15. By then the temperature had reached to the dizzy heights of freezing point. The catching started straight away. Ironically, I had set up a feeding station, along what is always our busiest net ride, on Thursday, and the feeders had not been touched, so we just removed them. Waste not, want not.
The catch was relatively predictable. Our avian highlight was:
So nice to catch a Chaffinch with such beautiful, healthy looking, legs. They are not a bird that we catch a lot of at Lower Moor: in the 13 years I have been ringing at this site we have only ringed 34 of them. This is our third of this year there. We have almost certainly caught more than double that number, but FPV is still a major issue in local Chaffinch and Bullfinch populations.
The list from the session was: Treecreeper (2); Blue Tit 4(3); Great Tit 4(2); Long-tailed Tit 5(1); Wren 6(2); Dunnock 1(1); Redwing 1; Song Thrush 2; Blackbird 1; Goldcrest 1(1); Chaffinch 1.
As ever, we had lots of nice chats with the people out for a Saturday constitutional. Everybody was very pleasant and pleased to see the odd bird. When you ring and recapture so many Blue and Great Tits, one tends to get a bit blasé about them. However, so many of our casual observers are delighted to see them and equally pleased to be shown how to safely hold and release them or, as I put it, “Who would like to get bitten by a Blue Tit?”. For the critics: my view is that enabling individuals, particularly children, to safely hold and release a bird can prepare them for accidental encounters later in life, not to mention recruiting them as future ringers.
It was a lovely morning and I have to admit that the highlights were not what we caught. Nor were they the Little Egrets, hanging out with half-a-dozen wing drying Cormorants on the opposite side of Mallard Lake, but the wonderful views we had, on and off all morning, of the Otters swimming and hunting on the Lake. We have had views in the past, but never so frequently as they were around this morning.
Unfortunately, we didn’t see them but either the staff at Lower Moor Farm have been trigger happy with their chainsaws or else, as David pointed out, the Beavers are being rather active at the moment. Fingers crossed!
Anyway, we worked through until midday until we closed the nets. While the team cleared the Heronry ride, I checked the wildlife refuge nets and took out the last three birds of the session: Song Thrush, Wren and Blue Tit. It is not often that Wrens are the biggest cohort of our catch but we ringed six and retrapped two. Nearest to that was Blue Tit, with four and three, and Long-tailed Tit, five and one, and Great Tit, four and two.
We left site at 13:00, well happy with the morning’s work.