Author: Braydon Forest & Beyond

Although the Marsh Tit, Poecile palustris, is a common resident bird in woodlands and forests around Europe, due to the parlous state of our woodlands and lack of cohesive forest, it is a red-listed bird in the UK.  In the north of Wiltshire is the once royal hunting area of the Braydon Forest.  Nowadays it comprises a number of woodlands of various sizes interspersed mainly by farms, with grassland fields grazed by cattle, sheep and the odd horse.  There are also excellent hedgerows that are, largely, well-maintained and extensive, helping to knit the woodlands together.

Since August 2012,  working solo at first, and then, as I gained experience and permission from the BTO to work with and then train other ringers, I have been running a colour ringing project on the species.  Colour ringing enables casual birders to add their observations to our totals.  In return, I can tell them exactly when and where the bird was ringed and if and when it has been recaptured.  This photo, taken by Dave Gilbert, shows Marsh Tit number ACJ5800, ringed as a juvenile in Ravensroost Wood  on 12th November 2019 and photographed by Dave on the 23rd March this year.

 

The project is focused on the Forestry Commission properties of Red Lodge, Webb’s Wood and Somerford Common and the Wiltshire Wildlife reserves at Ravensroost Wood and the Firs.  Our results since the start of the project are shown below.  The project year runs from 1st April to 31st March for all years bar the first, which ran from September to March inclusive.

Table 1: New birds caught and ringed by year by site:

Table 2: Other individuals retrapped by year by site:

Table 3: Annual totals of individuals caught by site:

What these tables show is that Ravensroost Wood is a stronghold for the species, closely followed by Red Lodge and Somerford Common.  Webb’s Wood, although the second largest by area, has been somewhat less productive than one would have expected. However, I believe that is because we set our nets in the same places each session and it reflects the number of territories covered, not the total number in the wood.  The Firs was the first place that I caught a Marsh Tit for the project, in September 2012, and then we did not catch another there until 11th November 2015, over 3 years later.  In the interim there was significant work thinning the wood and opening up a number of butterfly glades, plus the installation of two wildlife ponds on the site.

The longest lived Marsh Tits that we have found in our study was one ringed as an adult in Webb’s Wood on the 2nd February 2013 and then captured there for the sixth time on the 15th February 2019.  The other was ringed as an adult Ravensroost Wood on the 13th October 2012. It has been recaptured in every subsequent year until 6th January 2018.  Conservatively, they were both at least 7 years old at the last occasion (so far) that they were caught.  The longevity record for the Marsh Tit is 11 years and 3 months from date of ringing, so they could both still be about.

Our plans for this year were to map each territory in the woods, using a sound lure given to me by Richard Broughton, who is the UK’s most active and leading Marsh Tit biologist. That was planned for March and April but the combination of needing to catch up for lost time in January and February, and then the Covid-19 restrictions has put paid to that.  So, deferred for now, but planned for next spring.

As ringers, we are rather used to being challenged over the value of what we do.  Obviously, the Forestry Commission and the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust see the value, as I send them (inundate them) with reports and recommendations based on our ringing results. Last year the Forestry Commission put forward their 10-year plan for the Braydon Forest and, I am pleased to say that, based on the information we have provided over the years, they have made the Marsh Tit their priority bird species within that plan.

My report analyses for the work my team does in the Braydon Forest runs from the 1st April of the current year to 31st March of the following year.  By doing so, we have consistency of reporting and cover not just the seasons but also the key movement times of our birds.  For example, we can effectively compare winter figures in a way that you cannot if you use the calendar year as your guide.  Whilst we are in this state of lockdown I will use some of those analyses as the basis of some blog posts.

As anyone who has been birding for any length of time knows, the Goldcrest is our smallest resident species.  Over the course of the year we will catch birds with weights between 4.5g and 6.0g.  To put this into perspective, a two-pence piece weighs 7.05g.

We had a particularly good year for Goldcrest in the Braydon Forest this year, 2019/20.  Our previous best catch was a total of 95 birds ringed in 2016/17.  Generally we catch and ring between 50 and 70 of them each year.  Recovery rates are quite low compared to other species within the Forest, but we regularly recapture around 15 individuals each year.  This year we caught and ringed 146 birds and recaptured 42.  Naturally, some of those recaptured birds were birds that had been ringed in the period, and some birds were caught more than once. In reality, we processed 157 individual Goldcrest this year: a 50% increase on our previous largest catch.  The vast majority were processed in the last 6 months of the year, and were mainly juvenile birds.

Whilst it is always encouraging to see ringing catches improve over time, what set this year apart for Goldcrest is what was recaptured.  Goldcrest are renowned for flying long distances for such a small bird.  Many of the northern European population either fly across the North Sea or down the west coast of mainland Europe, to cross to the UK much further down to over-winter.  The longest ringing recovery of Goldcrest was back in 2010, when a bird ringed in the Orkney Islands was recovered 29 days later, 830km away in Suffolk.

Having access to all of our ringing group’s records, through the BTO’s DemOn on-line recording and retrieval system, I had a look at the recovery records for Goldcrest, going back 20 years, to see if we had any unusual recoveries before this year.  All previous recoveries were of birds ringed on our allocated ring series.

On the 19th October 2019 we carried out a ringing session in the Firs nature reserve and had a modest catch of 8 Goldcrest ringed and one recovery. However, the recovery did not have one of our rings on it.  When the information came through from the BTO a couple of days later, it showed that this bird was ringed as an adult male on the Calf-of-Man, at the Bird Observatory, on the 7th April 2019.   That in itself is interesting: the Calf of Man is not renowned for its conifer forests and at that time of year that bird would be heading northern latitudes for breeding.  Ending up in the Firs in October is quite something.  It means that the minimum distance it flew to get there was 338km in 169 days. I suspect it had flown a lot further than that, bred and ended up in the Firs on its subsequent autumn migration, for the reasons given previously.

On the 3rd November 2019 we caught and ringed 7 Goldcrest in Ravensroost Woods and recaptured one more. Astonishingly, this bird, a juvenile male, had a very similar ring number to the one caught in the Firs, and had also been ringed on the Calf-of-Man, this time on the 5th September 2019, and had flown 335km to get to our site.  This was its first trip south.

I don’t know what it was about this period last year but to go from never having recaptured a Goldcrest from “out of town” to recapturing two that had clearly migrated along the west coast of the UK was very exciting.

As I was putting the finishing touches to my annual report, I received notification from the BTO that an adult female Goldcrest that we had ringed in the Firs, in that session on the 19th October, had been recovered at the Bardsey Island bird observatory on the 26th March. Clearly there is possibly a western flyway for Goldcrest along the west coast of the UK.  Why we have started to get evidence of that in Wiltshire this year I have no idea, but I am hoping that we can get a lot more evidence to support the hypothesis over the next few years.

With the government lockdown coming into effect, the BTO issued instructions that all survey work that could not be done from your garden was to be cancelled. For bird ringing this is hard on our T-permit trainees, but it is impossible to adequately practise social distancing and monitor their activities or check their work.  This has meant that all trainees, except those who have a C-permit or are lucky / unlucky enough to be the children of trainers, will have no chance to develop and practise their skills until this period is over.

I am lucky enough to have a reasonable sized garden, in a rural location, with fields, allotments and trees all around.  My garden is also, no doubt to the chagrin of my neighbours, with their immaculately kept wildlife deserts, left very much to its own devices.  The “grass” is cut no more than once a month and wildflowers encouraged.

I have a feeding station offering sunflower hearts (opium for the bird masses) and fat balls plus a peanut feeder in my apple tree.  The garden isn’t huge but I manage to set three nets: a 9m and 3m dog-legged and a 6m.  Diagram below:

A bit messy but I’ve never been an artist!  The pond was full of frogs and toads, it now has a few frogs, lots of spawn (the most we have ever had), which is now hatching, and plenty of Smooth Newts, come for the feast.  It must be a hard life being a female toad in the mating season:

I have made the decision not to overdo the ringing in the garden: to keep it to my usual two sessions per week, when the weather allows.  The key benefits of garden ringing are that it is largely unhurried, especially as my electronic cat scarer, backed up by a well-primed Super Soaker, is more than enough to deter the neighbourhood cats and tea, coffee and biscuits are on tap.

Unfortunately, the masses of birds we had coming to the feeders has dropped off considerably. Presumably they have more pressing matters: nesting, mating, incubating and rearing.  However, I am still catching birds, and it does make a nice change from the hundreds of Blue and Great Tits we have been getting in the woods.

Over these three sessions I have caught the following: Blue Tit 1(1); Coal Tit 2(1); Long-tailed Tit 1; Dunnock 2(1); Robin (1); Blackbird 2(4); Chaffinch 1; Goldfinch 11; Greenfinch 6; Starling 1; House Sparrow 1.  Totals: 28 birds ringed from 10 species and 8 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 36 birds processed from 11 species.

It is a decent variety, even if they are not the biggest of catches.  The difference is, when I am out with the team I do far more supervising than ringing. Any session where I have more than one trainee with me, I do no ringing at all, so it is nice to have it all to myself sometimes.

 

As of Tuesday, 24th March 2020 the BTO has suspended all surveying activities until the government lift the lockdown status in the country. This means that all permit holders above the basic T-permit for trainees can continue to ring if their garden is suitable for such activities.  There will be no more site visits until we are advised otherwise.

Prior to this necessary precaution, we did get in a few sessions at our sites that I have not yet blogged about.  This is a brief summary of what happened where.

Webb’s Wood, Wednesday, 7th March: I was joined by Alice at Webb’s Wood. It is the one site this winter that I had not set up a feeding station.  A combination of factors but, basically, I didn’t want to buy any new ones this winter, with squirrels destroying some, humans stealing others, sometimes you just think “is it worth it?”.  If you put out expensive squirrel-proof ones some tea-leaf will help themselves to it, cheap ones: squirrels just eat them.  Even bird tables hammered into the ground aren’t immune: I have had them ripped up and thrown into ponds, or removed and used as a bivouac support by an unauthorised “forest school”. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that we did not have the biggest catch of the winter.

The list for the session was: Blue Tit 3; Great Tit 3(2); Wren (1); Robin 2; Goldcrest 1(1). Totals: 9 birds ringed from 4 species and 4 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 13 birds processed from 5 species.

Jonny Cooper and I followed that up with a visit to Red Lodge on Friday, 13th March: good job we aren’t superstitious.  We had a decent session: 30 birds of which 12 were Blue Tits! It is not really surprising, as they were caught at the feeding stations set up there, and Blue Tits love a free feed.

The list for the session was: Nuthatch 1; Blue Tit 11(1); Great Tit 5(3); Coal Tit 1; Long-tailed Tit 2(3); Robin (1); Wren (2).  Totals: 20 birds ringed from 5 species and 10 bird retrapped from 5 species, making 30 birds processed from 7 species.

Alice joined me again for a trip to Somerford Common on Tuesday, 17th March. Although I did have feeders in place, it was a small catch: mainly because the wind got up and we had to close the nets early, after just a couple of hours. In some ways it was a remarkable catch: of 14 birds only 2 were unringed.  The list for the day was: Great Spotted Woodpecker (1); Nuthatch (2); Great Tit 1(6); Coal Tit (1); Marsh Tit (1); Goldcrest 1; Siskin (1).  Totals 2 birds ringed from 2 species and 12 birds retrapped from 6 species, making 14 bird processed from 7 species.

What was notable about this session: not a single Blue Tit to be had. I cannot remember ever doing a ringing session at a winter feeding station that did not have any Blue Tits in the catch.

More excitingly, the Siskin that we caught was the female we ringed at the last session.  Although I have caught Siskin right up to the end of March in the Braydon Forest, this is the first female that I have caught here that was coming in to breeding condition.  They sued to breed at Somerford a long time ago but since I started my ringing activities there and in Webb’s back in 2012, this is the first with any sign of potentially breeding here.  I have had several of the Siskin I ring recaptured elsewhere: mainly up in Scotland, where they breed regularly. If we manage to catch a newly fledged juvenile in July or early August I will take that as a positive sign of local breeding, as we found with Lesser Redpoll at Ravensroost a couple of years ago.

My last pre-lockdown session was on Saturday, 21st March at Ravensroost Woods.  I felt comfortable that I could avoid contact with people, as the nets are set away from the main paths and the track they are on is far too muddy for most people.  It was a decent session, with our first Chiffchaff of the year arriving on site.  Two were birds returning from last year.  At this time they are predominantly males, singing their hearts out as they set up territories in the wood.  Who knows when we will be able to have another ringing session in any of our sites, so I plan to enjoy the memory of that one.

The list for the day was: Nuthatch (3); Blue Tit 7(7); Great Tit 7(2); Marsh Tit (2); Robin 1; Song Thrush 1; Chiffchaff 4(2); Goldcrest 1(1).  Totals: 21 birds ringed from 6 species and 17 birds retrapped from 6 species, making 38 birds processed from 8 species.

In those last two ringing sessions virtually every male bird was showing signs of being ready to breed. That is quite early.  The Marsh Tits that I caught in Ravensroost were a definite pair. They were in the same net, at the same height, no more than 6″ apart.  One was male, showing a well-defined cloacal protuberance, and the other a female, with a very definite brood patch in development.  The females lose the feathers from their chest and belly, to provide a warm patch to incubate the eggs and nurture the nestlings. This one was still in the process of losing feathers, but it was a very definite development.

The team and I will continue to blog: as most of us can continue to ring in our gardens and, being mainly rural, there is always the chance of a good catch.

With the forecast being for a decent day I decided to set some nets in the garden.  To save time in the morning, I set them up on Thursday night.  As luck would have it, there was a frost overnight, and any time I might have saved was used up getting them to open.

The beauty of garden ringing is that you can watch from the warmth and comfort of your own home. Food and drink is on tap, and I could do some work in between net checks.

It was a really good session: a good number of birds from a decent variety of species.  The list for the day was: Blue Tit 4; Great Tit (1); Coal Tit 1; Long-tailed Tit 1; Dunnock 1(1); Robin 1(1); Blackbird 3; House Sparrow 4; Starling 1; Chaffinch 1; Goldfinch 12(2); Greenfinch 4.  Totals: 33 birds ringed from 11 species and 5 birds recaptured from 4 species, making 38 birds processed from 12 species.

Given that there is an excellent population of House Sparrow in Purton,  a few pairs nest in the roof of my house, I rarely catch them in my nets, so to catch four was a definite highlight.  Also, after the calamitous reduction in the population of Greenfinch, as a result of the Trichomonosis parasite.  It has been a relief not to have seen any evidence of it in the birds frequenting my garden in the last three years.  I regularly see half-a-dozen of them around my feeding station and to catch four today was very encouraging.

The birds from both these species have quite a bite on them and, as you can see from these photographs, have a bit of attitude about them:

Taking further advantage of the break in the bad weather, Jonny, Alice and I went for a session at Somerford Common this morning.  We set just 4 x 18 metre nets around the feeding station, as the forecast was for it to be breezy. Fortunately the wind stayed very low for most of the morning (when you start at 6:30 and the wind gets up at 10:45, that is “most of the morning”) until, at 10:45 there was a bit of a squall: a sharp shower and some high wind, followed by some light rain, had us taking the nets down.  Annoyingly, by the time we had the nets down the rain had stopped, the wind had dropped and the sun had come out!  Even more annoyingly, a largish flock of Goldfinch arrived in the trees around the ringing site. We decided not to set up again.

It had been a really good session, starting with a couple of Siskin and our first ever Reed Bunting for the site in the first round.

 

The list for the day was: Great Spotted Woodpecker (1); Nuthatch (2); Blue Tit 10(5); Great Tit 8(8); Coal Tit 5(3); Marsh Tit 1(1); Long-tailed Tit 1; Robin 1; Chaffinch 5; Siskin 2; Reed Bunting 1.  Totals: 34 birds ringed from 9 species and 20 birds retrapped from 6 species, making 54 birds processed from 11 species.

If anyone was under any illusions about the strength of the winds that we have been having recently, this is a picture of an oak tree situated in the hedgerow immediately adjacent to the main Ravensroost woodland:

The trunk of that tree was 1 metre diameter.

I was joined for the session by Jonny, Andrew, Tony and Steph: everybody looking for an opportunity to get out and do some ringing.  We knew it would be a session dominated by Blue Tits. At this time of year, catching at the supplementary feeding stations that I set up and stock, they will always be the numerically dominant species.  However, we did catch a decent spread of species and a good total catch of 59 birds, mainly in the 3 small nets adjacent to the feeders.

There were a number of highlights. Chief amongst them was our fourth Jay of 2020.  Last year that was the total my team caught in the whole 12 months, in 2018 it was 5!  This was a bird with personality:

The list for the day was: Great Spotted Woodpecker 1; Nuthatch (1); Jay 1; Blue Tit 17(19); Great Tit 3(6); Coal Tit 1(1); Marsh Tit (2); Long-tailed Tit 1(1); Robin 1; Blackbird 2(1); Chaffinch 1. Totals: 28 birds ringed from 9 species and 31 birds retrapped from 7 species, making 59 birds processed from 11 species.

It would have been 60 birds but a female Great Spotted Woodpecker managed to escape the net whilst I was topping up a peanut feeder.

We noticed this rather pretty fungus alongside the main track:

It is called Sarcoscypha coccinea and is, appropriately, associated with hazel woodlands. Ravensroost Wood is a hazel coppice with oak guard trees.  Hazel is coppiced on an 8 year cycle at the southern end of the wood, and a twenty-five year cycle at the northern end of the wood.  Most of our ringing takes place in the 8 year coppice coupes.

 

Thanks to Ciara, Dennis and Jorge, February 2020 turned out to be a very poor month.  We only managed to fit in 8 full sessions.  Not our worst ever by any stretch.  The first month after the great schism and the restructuring of the group was, appropriately, the worst, with just 86 birds ringed and 54 birds recaptured in January 2013.  It isn’t even our worst February: that was 2016, when we ringed 160 and recaptured 79 in the same number of ringing sessions.  Given the horrors visited on large swathes of the population, it would be churlish to complain.

The catch, and comparison to 2019, was as follows:

Essentially, the catch held up well, it was just the lack of opportunity that depressed the overall numbers.  Let’s hope March is better weather-wise.

 

The following reports by Jonny Cooper are the annual summaries from his sites at Baileys and Meadow Farm.  Two excellent and very varied sites for birdlife.

Baileys_Farm_2019_Report

Meadow_Farm_2019_Report

After several cancelled sessions due to this horrendous weather, we finally managed to get out for a ringing session this morning.  Although wind was still forecast, it was scheduled to be lighter than of late, although still gusting to just under 30 mph.  As a result, we could only contemplate setting up in a good woodland area.  With the wind scheduled to come from the west, I chose the Firs. It is the only one of our woodland sites where the net rides run north to south, so the woodland would block the wind.  Somerford Common, Ravensroost Woods and Webb’s Wood all have the main net rides running east to west, which would have had the wind blowing along them.

Everybody who could make it came along, so the team was Jonny, Steph, Lillie (on half-term), Alice and Tony.  My only concern was whether we would catch enough birds to make it worth their while.  In the end we had a decent haul of 46 birds, but we had to shorten the session as the wind got up enough to affect the nets and, as a the birds’ welfare is paramount, we closed the nets an hour-and-a-half earlier than usual.

I had topped up the feeding station on Wednesday afternoon, so there was plenty of bird activity and the catch was: Nuthatch 1; Blue Tit 14(10); Great Tit 5(7); Coal Tit (1); Marsh Tit 1(1); Wren 1; Robin 1(1); Song Thrush 1; Blackbird 1; Chaffinch 1.  Totals: 26 birds ringed from 9 species and 20 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 46 birds processed from 10 species.

There was a lot of bird song in the wood, and plenty of Great Spotted Woodpecker drumming – although they seemed to be too busy playing percussion to visit the peanut feeder, so we didn’t catch any.  Nuthatch were calling everywhere, it seemed and there were at least 3 Marsh Tits calling in the wood. For such a small wood to potentially have 3 Marsh Tit territories is a real feather in the cap of the management regime.  The new Marsh Tit was the fourth of 2020 already.   It is our best start to the year for this species since we started ringing at these sites in 2013.

A cautionary tale to all of the squirrels out there: don’t try and steal from my large seed feeder! Last week when I went to top up the feeders at my woodland sites, I left the Firs to last, as it is the muddiest, most slippery site I have – and the furthest to walk to the feeding station.  Approaching the feeder I thought “Heck and damnation, the seed has got wet and stuck in the tube”.  When I got closer I saw that the lid had been prised off and that the clump of seed was, in fact, a dead grey squirrel.  The feeder has 8 ports: 2 opposite each other and each set offset by 180º to the previous.  This squirrel had worked its way in, and bent its body around the various ports and then been unable to extricate itself.  They are clever beasts, but this one was far too clever for its own good. I had the very devil of a job getting the carcass out of the feeder, but it gave it a good clean as it came out: like a furry bottle brush!  I have replaced the lid and wired it shut, so there shouldn’t be a repeat.