Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond

A departure today: our ringing session never got started. Despite a forecast that the day would be dry after overnight rain, I decided to start later than normal to ensure it had cleared. When I left home the rain had cleared and I arrived on site: David and Sarah arrived – and so did the rain. We waited for 30 minutes, it didn’t clear, so we went home. It eventually brightened up two hours later. So, instead, this is a longer video I cobbled together, from a number of very short videos my trail camera took, on Thursday night. It is a bit jerky as a result but it shows pretty well the interaction. I have done a factory reset and hope it will sort it out!

I had planned to run this session last Sunday. The weather forecast was fine: a dry day, low winds and sunshine. So we arrived on site for our 5:30 start, only as I pulled into the site it started raining. Laura and her boys pulled in alongside me and we waited to see what would happen. At 6:00, with the rain still falling, we decided that going home and back to bed was a better bet. With other commitments, today was the last available within the timeframe for CES session 5. I was joined for the session by Miranda and Rosie. Rosie did her usual of helping set up and process some birds before heading off to work for the Wildlife Trust. Today she had to leave at 8:00 but, fortunately, we had a decent early catch and she managed to process 15 birds before heading off to work. For once I was able to help pay her back for some of her efforts, by taking 20 minutes out to help her load a new picnic table / bench combination for the new Great Wood complex onto the trailer being used to transport it. It was very heavy: there is no way that she could have done that on her own.

Given that the forecast for today was for it to be sunny all day with some light winds, it was dull, overcast and much blowier than expected when we arrived. Fortunately, although it took a fair while for the clouds to break and allow the sun through, there was no rain and our nets are in sheltered enough positions to allow us to work with the way the winds were blowing. The sun eventually broke through at about 10:00, the wind dropped right down, and the weather became very pleasant.

We had the nets open pretty quickly, but didn’t get our first birds until 6:45. It was nice to have females of both Garden Warbler and Cetti’s Warbler in that first catch. Nothing else was caught until 7:30, whereupon we had a mixed fall of 22 birds: mainly Long-tailed Tits, but Chiffchaffs, Blackcaps and Blue Tits as well – and our first juvenile Wren of the year:

Recently Fledged Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes

By recently fledged I mean that it has clearly left the nest, but hasn’t yet started its post-fledging moult, whereby it grows body feathers on the belly, along the flanks and under the wings.

There are lots of things I like about Wrens, starting with their torturing of trainee ringers learning to extract them. Unlike Blue Tits, they are not feisty but they are superb at crawling through the mesh of the net, taking lots of it with them and “double pocketing”. Perhaps their commonest trick is twisting the net: they can take a piece of net and spin twenty, thirty or more times within it, making it look impossible to extract them. It isn’t: it just takes patience.

Their binomial is pretty good: double cave-dweller! One thing that this photo shows very clearly is the way that the dark and light edging on the primary feathers line up so neatly. This is a key identifier for first year birds and for second year birds until they go through their first post-breeding moult. They line up nicely because in the young bird all of the primary wing feathers grow simultaneously. When the adults and second year birds moult their primaries post-breeding, they do it ascendantly. What that means is that the moult starts from the primary nearest the body and each feather is replaced in turn, leading to the outer edge of the wing. As a result, the edge never lines up in such a neat way again.

It was a lovely session: we finally had a halfway decent catch: Blue Tit [8]; Great Tit [2]; Long-tailed Tit 1[7](6); Wren 1[2](1); Dunnock [2](1); Robin [5]; Blackbird (1); Cetti’s Warbler (1); Blackcap 1[4](3); Garden Warbler 1; Chiffchaff [7](1). Totals: 4 adults ringed from 4 species, 37 juveniles ringed from 8 species and 14 birds retrapped from 11 species.

When compared to CES 5 last year this is a big improvement: that was 7 adults ringed from 6 species, 22 juveniles ringed from 7 species and 9 birds retrapped from 6 species, making 38 birds processed from 12 species.

It is our biggest catch at any of my sites since the 16^th February this year, but that was promoted by the supplementary winter feeding that I stopped at the end of that month.

It was a very pleasant morning, with some excellent experiences. Perhaps the best was when Rosie and Miranda noticed a very direct line moving across Mallard Lake. This line suddenly became a hairy backside emerging from the water, then under again and up again. We had a good ten minutes watching the Otter as he chased, caught, and then proceeded to munch his way through his breakfast! He had his breakfast long before we did.

Next on the agenda was what Miranda originally thought was a cow imitating a Bittern, which actually was a Bittern booming! I have been lucky enough to see Bittern flying over the reserve on a couple of occasions, and we know that they breed elsewhere in the Water Park. However, there are currently no suitable reedbeds at Lower Moor Farm, so perhaps it was prospecting or fishing.

Finally, a late male Cuckoo calling as we were packing away. Miranda and I closed the nets at midday and took down. We were away from site around about 13:00.

I needed to recheck some of the Barn Owl boxes we visited on the 9th May. The boxes ear-marked for checking this morning were the three Wiltshire Wildlife Trust boxes. I was joined by Rosie for these checks, helping before she had to head off for work with the Trust. We found the following:

Poucher’s Field: on the first visit we discovered two warm eggs and five naked and blind youngsters. Today we found that the five youngsters have grown well, but there was no sign of the eggs. Perhaps they were food for the others during one of the many wet spells we have had. The youngsters that were left we ringed and weighed: all weighed in at decent weights. The smallest was 350g, the heaviest were two of them weighing in at 415g. There were mice / voles inside the box: it is clearly a good year for small rodents and, therefore, Barn Owls.

Allotment Field: there were just three warm eggs in the box back in May. This morning we caught a second year male on the nest. Rosie got to ring her first adult Barn Owl. Inside the box we then found five small, nearly naked, but growing down, chicks. Their wing feathers were just starting to develop: fully in pin. We will revisit in three weeks or so to ring those chicks.

Ravensroost Meadows: this was slightly disappointing. Back in May we found four small chicks and two warm eggs. This morning we found two rather large chicks, primary feathers were two-thirds grown and they weighed in at around 380g each. There was also one dead chick in the box. Distasteful as it might be to human tastes, we left the dead chick in the nest as a potential snack for the others if prey becomes a bit scarce.

Barn Owl chicks, Tyto alba

Once we had completed ringing and weighing these two we called a halt, as Rosie had to get off to work. And so to the afternoon!

Justine had been approached through the local RSPB group about ringing some Kestrel chicks in a box in a back garden on the way into Amesbury. She was sent a photo of the chicks and determined that she would be away on the Isle of Mull for the ideal two week period for ringing them, so she asked me to do it for her. I made contact with the owner of the garden and arranged to visit today to ring the chicks. He has a nest-cam set up and he sent me a video of the five of them, from which this still was taken:

Kestrel chicks, Falco tinnunculus

Nice, little bundles of fluff. Only he didn’t say when that was taken. I arrived on site at 14:30 and, with some help from the owners with a ladder and cups of tea, I managed to get the chicks bagged up and ready for ringing. They were considerably more developed than I was expecting. As you can see from the following photo, their feet and talons are very well developed:

When you are putting your hands into a box, blindly reaching for the chicks, those feet are quite a painful method of finding where they were sitting. These birds are growing nicely and the wings and tail are developing:

As soon as they were processed I put them back in the box and we retreated a safe distance for tea and biscuits. One of the queries that we often get is whether or not ringing the nestlings could cause the parents to desert their brood. I was sent the following video of the adult male delivering food to the chicks about 10 minutes after I had left site:

As some of you will know, when the icon that is Nigel Lewis retired from bird ringing he left four C-permit holders without a trainer. Like Nigel, they were all part of the Salisbury Plain Ringing Group (SPRG). Since Nigel stepped back the group has been steered by Dick Clayton, and they have an organised working regime. However, Dick is not a trainer, so he could not take responsibility for their licences: a C-permit is still a training permit. As I am a trainer, and they would not be any sort of burden, I offered to become their nominated trainer. As their trainer, I needed to meet up and see how they work. They only have to see me once a year and it seemed sensible to get to see them early on. I have already had the pleasure of working with Justine as, prior to Nigel’s retirement, she had already started working with me to expand her ringing skills to include Passerines and near Passerines.

Today I was invited by Dick to join him and Jon Pepper checking Barn Owl and Kestrel boxes on Salisbury Plain. We arranged to meet at West Down Camp at 8:15. I thought I would aim for 8:00, to give a bit of leeway. Last time I went through Devizes there were horrendous roadworks, so I gave myself an extra 20 minutes to get there. So I arrived in Tilshead, just down the road, at 7:30. Time for a large Costa Americano!

I booked in at the camp with the two very friendly ladies manning the entrance barrier, chatted about what we were going to be doing and showed them some photos from previous sessions. Dick arrived and I followed him on to the site. We parked up, Jon arrived and booked in with Range Control, and we set off in the SPRG 4-wheel drive. Virtually the whole time was spent on military land.

We worked through until 16:00 and ringed 15 Kestrel chicks from 4 broods and 9 Barn Owl chicks from 3 broods. Two adult Barn Owls were caught at different boxes: one retrap and one to be ringed. Jon was a trooper: doing all of the driving, ladder carrying, chick handling and nest box cleaning. He is also responsible for all of the photos of live birds and the bees. Mine are the birds as food, the orchids and the beetle.

Not everything was rosy, particularly for the Barn Owls. The first unfortunate finding was particularly sad:

Normally I would love to find a wild bee’s nest. Unfortunately, this bee’s nest inside the owl box had tragic results. We found three dead, emaciated chicks in the nest. There was food there, but too big for the chicks at that age. They need the adults to rip up the voles and feed them directly. Unfortunately, the bees had built their nest across the access to the nesting area: preventing the adults from getting to their young, so they starved to death.

In another box we found that Jackdaws had built their nest on top of the Barn Owl nest. The Barn Owl nest contained three cold eggs. Those eggs had embryos at an early stage of development. This is something that happens reasonably regularly, particularly with Tawny Owls. Fortunately, despite finding plenty of Jackdaws in my nest boxes, I haven’t found this issue in my north Wiltshire boxes. It is possible that this is because our Barn Owls start breeding later than further south in the county. Certainly that was the impression I got when I did the session in the Wylye valley and some of my northern boxes in the same week.

The final, third, sad finding was in a somewhat unusual box structure: a Kestrel box, next door to a Barn Owl box, on the same platform. We caught the adult female in one of the boxes, the other was empty, but on the floor under the box were the feather remains of a reasonably well advanced Barn Owl chick. There were no bones or other remains, but wing feathers at the two-thirds grown stage and some fully adult body feathers.

I don’t want to give the impression that it was all doom and gloom: it was a really enjoyable and productive day, as the following images will show. It starts with Kestrels:

Recently-hatched chicks – too small to ring

Chicks ready for ringing

Developing well

Ringed and ready to fledge.

Barn Owls:

Recently hatched: too small to ring. With Barn Owls the legs and feet grow slowly, so they are usually ringed when at a larger, more advanced stage than in the Kestrels.

Growing well, ready for ringing

A few more weeks before fledging. The wings are one-third grown. If you look at the underwing coverts you can see several black spots. This indicates that this bird is a female.

Now, the traditional picture of Barn Owls is them hunting over open fields looking for small rodents. However, that is not always the case. The biggest chicks that we found seemed to have had a rather different diet:

When Jon cleaned the box out the extent of the predation on Starlings was quite astonishing. I do know that they do predate on Starlings: I found a pair of wings in one of my boxes at Upper Waterhay Farm, but it was how many the parents must have caught. Clearly they found a decent local Starling roost.

Whilst driving around I was delighted with how much other birdlife is being supported on the Plain. Buzzards and Red Kites were plentiful but the totality of “little brown jobs” was amazing: Linnets and Skylarks, Whitethroats and Corn Buntings – absolutely delightful.

The Plain is alive with insects including this beautifully marked Garden Chafer:

Garden Chafer, Phyllopertha horticola

There were some fabulous flowers out at the moment: plenty of Meadow Cranesbill, Buttercups galore, Cow Parsley reaching to heights of over 2.5m, Vipers Bugloss reaching 1m tall, and then these orchids:

I am no expert but I think that the majority are Fragrant Orchid, Gymnadenia conopsis, and the solitary small, compact flower, Pyramidal Orchid, Anacamptis pyramidalis. I am happy to be corrected.

After what was a busy and fulfilling day, and I am mightily impressed with my new trainee, we arrived back at West Down camp at just after 16:00 and headed for home. I will be out on Monday to ring some of the Barn Owls in my local area.

The following information has been provided to me by Rob Turner, retired Bird Recorder for Wiltshire and a senior member of the West Wilts Group and Phil Deacon, Wiltshire Ornithological Society committee member and senior member of the North Wilts Group.

Rob sent me the following: “Having been intrigued by Jonny’s record, I thought I’d have a quick trawl through the literature and the web.

The extreme dates for Wiltshire are 5 at Devizes 21 August 2018 and a single at Fyfield, 21 May 1978. (Hobby 48 , Wilts Bird Report 2021 p79.)
The ‘Birds of Wiltshire’ p575, final paragraph records a probable but unconfirmed breeding record at Coate Water area sometime between 1868-77. It does say: ‘Although no other British nesting records are known before the 1920’s the now regular population in Scotland and the odd instances of breeding in English Counties in the last 3 decades of the 20th century lends support to the account.’

Current BTO estimates are 50-100 pairs mostly restricted to Scottish Highlands and as far north as Shetland and a few as far south as Kent. As always with extreme records of migrants its always difficult to surmise which way the bird is going, is it a late departure of a wintering bird or an early arrival of a failed breeder!”

Phil noted: Nearest ringing record I have is one at Potterne on 13 May 1986. This bird was ringed at Spurn Point on the 11th October 1985. We get very few Redwing retraps: of our catch of just under 3,500 Redwing, there have only been seven retraps, but four of them were retrapped in the same winter after ringing. Only one of our records is from a bird retrapped at the same site in a subsequent winter. This was RL61400: ringed in Ravensroost Wood on the 28^th December 2016 and retrapped at the same site, in the same net, on the 6^th January 2018.

He also noted about Jonny’s photo of the bird: “An outstanding record, I have seen the photo, no CP or BP so a non-breeder, may not have been fit enough for the return migration.”

Andrew Harris, an experienced ringer from Kent, did remark upon the body weight of the bird: considerably more than the normal ranges for the species. The BTO’s BirdFacts has the weight range as being 55g to 84g. Our own records have a dozen Redwing weighing in at 80+g but this is the first with a weight of over 90g. Jonny has checked his records from the session and is 100% confident that the weight entered is accurate. It wasn’t challenged by the online data entry system, which has built-in extreme parameters. If it falls outside of the ranges it prompts you to confirm the value, with a comment to justify it. It didn’t do that because, if it had, the comment would be attached to the record.

I have to mention that Jonny also has another Redwing record: the longest known movement of a Redwing retrapped in the UK. On the 2^nd November 2022 he retrapped a juvenile Redwing that had been ringed in the nest at a place called Rautalampi, Pohjois-Savo, Kuopio, Finland. It had flown 2,126km to land at a farm just outside Chippenham! There are longer movements of birds ringed in the UK and recovered elsewhere (usually shot by some ne’er-do-well with no respect for wildlife).

Jonny Cooper was carrying out a ringing session at the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust reserve at Langford Lakes this morning. Checking the nets he came across this in one of his nets:

Redwing, Turdus iliacus

This winter visitor seems to have failed to make the move northwards. I have checked the group records and we have recorded 3,475 encounters with Redwing since the year 2000. Prior to Jonny’s catch today the latest record we had for an encounter with a Redwing was on the 28^th March 2019, by me, at Tedworth House.

This bird is a second year bird, i.e. fledged in 2023. It had wing length of 117mm and weighed in at 97.9g. Both are well within normal ranges for this species. Unsurprisingly, it showed no sign of breeding condition. One can only speculate on the reasons for this bird having failed to migrate. Perhaps it failed to put on enough weight over the latter months of the winter, who knows?

This really is a remarkable record. I would love to know if there are any later records for England or, indeed, any confirmed records of over-summering Redwing in England.

This time last year I would have titled this “Ravensroost Pond” or “Ravensroost Meadow Pond” but someone (I haven’t established who yet: the Ravensroost volunteers, the Wildlife Trust staff or contractors) has carried out a phenomenal amount of work at the site. They have removed bunds, moved paths, removed a massive overgrowth of bramble, expanded the main pond, lowered the causeway, removed the spit, and created several additional wet areas adjacent to the pond.

The change is stunning and, I am pretty sure, for the better. However, I am going to have to rethink my net positions to take advantage. Today I used some fairly standard positions – but I think the changes have had an adverse effect on them. Not a complaint, the changes were necessary (and overdue) but an observation, and something that I am happy to sort out, just not at 5:00 in the morning before I have had any coffee and needing to get the nets open anyway.

Bearing in mind the changes mentioned are not reflected on the aerial photograph yet, these were the net positions used today:

I was joined for the morning at 5:30 by Laura and Teresa. We had the nets set by 6:30 and the first birds were caught at 7:00. It was a very slow morning, with just one or two birds caught during most rounds. However, it was a decent variety within the catch: only 16 birds caught but from 10 species. The list for the morning was: Blue Tit 1; Great Tit [1]; Wren (1); Dunnock 2; Robin (1); Blackbird 1; Blackcap [2]; Whitethroat 1; Chiffchaff 1[4]; Willow Warbler 1. Totals: 7 adults ringed from 6 species, 7 juveniles from 3 species and 2 birds retrapped from 2 species.

The Blue Tit had clearly finished her parental duties: her brood patch had just started to feather over and she had started wing moult: seven retained primaries and then one each at stages 1, 2 and 3. The Willow Warbler was also female and, whilst still showing a strongly veined brood patch, had also started wing moult: eight retained primaries and then one each at stages 1 and 2.

We caught our first juvenile Great Tit of the year:

Great Tit, Parus major

In amongst the juvenile Chiffchaff was this one:

Chiffchaff, Phylloscopus collybita

Biometrics, wing structure and wing formula were all 100% f0r Chiffchaff but I cannot say that I have ever seen such muted markings on a recently fledged juvenile.

The place was alive with insects, so it was a little surprising that we didn’t catch more insectivorous birds. I think that this was my favourite insect of the morning though:

Swollen-thighed Beetle, Oedemera nobilis, on Ox-Eye Daisy, Leucanthemum vulgare

There was a lot of birdsong and a few other birds flying around: a solitary Swallow made an appearance over the adjacent meadow. The most interesting interaction of the morning was a Buzzard being mobbed by a solitary Jackdaw until the Buzzard decided it had had enough, executed a pretty acrobatic wheel to get behind the Jackdaw and give it a hard tine until they both disappeared into the wood.

However, the best sighting of the morning belonged to Laura. On her way back from a check on the nets she came across a Grass Snake. Unfortunately, they move very fast and it had disappeared by the time she managed to get the camera app on her phone loaded. Shame!

The weather stayed fine throughout. Forecast showers for 10:00 did not materialise, although we did have a very large, very black, cloud move slowly overhead at about that time, but it did not drop a drop.

We shut the nets after the last round at 11:30, took down and left site by 12:20. A quiet but reasonably satisfying session.

With the forecast being for it to be a bit breezy I decided to try something a bit different at Somerford Common. I warned the crew that it might not work, but David, Laura, Adam and Daniel joined me regardless. We met at 5:30 and went to the winter feeding station / CES area and put up a rather different set of nets:

We had the nets open quickly and then waited for some birds to arrive. The first birds hit the nets at 6:45: two Chiffchaff and a Willow Warbler. The next round produced another three birds: two Willow Warblers and our first Garden Warbler at Somerford Common for three years at this site. Whilst we were processing these, the moisture that had made its way into the air turned into a fairly heavy rain shower, so we shut the nets and sat in the cars until it stopped.

Once we reopened the nets the birds had really just disappeared: plenty of song, not a lot of movement. Between 8:15, when we reopened the nets and 10:00, when we shut them again, we only caught another six birds. The list from the day was: Garden Warbler 1; Chiffchaff 4; Willow Warbler 5(2). Totals: 10 birds ringed from 3 species and 2 birds retrapped from one species, making 12 birds processed from 3 species.

What was pleasing about this small catch was that three of the Willow Warblers were females: looking forward to finding some youngsters in due course. Unfortunately, just before 10:00 the rain started to fall again. This time it was heavier and the sky overhead was looking threatening so we decided to shut the nets and take down. Naturally, there were a final couple of birds in the nets, so they were processed by Adam and Daniel, whilst Laura and David started taking in the nets.

The last bird out of the net, LXL255, is a Willow Warbler male but, not on our rings. It will be interesting to see where it was originally ringed.

We were off-site by 10:30: just as the rain stopped, the clouds broke and the sun came out again. Too late!

A bit of variety today. It started at 8:30 this morning at Clattinger Farm. I met up with Rosie and we checked on progress to date. All of the nest checking and bird ringing that I do is under licence from the British Trust for Ornithology. The Barn Owl checking I do has an additional schedule 1 licence issued by the BTO on behalf of Natural England and DEFRA.

Last year was a successful first year checking at Clattinger: we had seven Swallow nests in the old stables and woodshed. Two were predated, one was abandoned, but the other four successfully produced twelve fledglings. We also had two successful Blackbird nests, with seven young fledged, one House Sparrow nest that successfully fledged three young and one Robin nest that also successfully fledged three young (it made its nest in a plastic box in the tool shed that used to hold screws).

This year has been a little slower: we checked on one Blackbird nest that was empty and two Wren nests that were also empty. As all nests were intact with no signs of damage, so we are pretty confident that they are first broods that have fledged.

The number of Swallows, so far, and, therefore, the nests, is currently much lower than last year: just three nests established so far. One had two young which were large enough to ring. Another nest had four warm eggs and the third had three young that are too small to ring yet. We will do them in a week’s time.

There does now seem to be far more Swallows flying around the site than the number of nests represent. Hopefully, when we come back in a week, they will have started to nest. Whilst watching what was going on we saw a Great Spotted Woodpecker trying to get at the House Sparrow nests. I suspect it will find it hard, as they are nesting in holes in the building walls. The building is very old but I am still not sure that a Great Spotted Woodpecker bill is designed to be a masonry drill.

We finished up at just after 9:15, so Rosie and her sidekick, Ellie, could get on with their paid work for the Wildlife Trust!

I spent the rest of the morning with one of my new raptor trainees, Justine, helping her get to grips with the online data entry system, DemOn. Once we finished that, we headed off to Waterhay to the farms there to check on the Barn Owl boxes there.

There were three boxes on site and every year between 2019 (when I took over checking the boxes) and 2022, two of those boxes would successfully produce Barn Owl young. In 2022 we put up a fourth box and then in 2023 we had no Barn Owl broods at all, but one Jackdaw brood ringed and the two other original boxes had clearly had Jackdaws nesting there. So I was little trepidacious as to what we would find.

The Chancel box had some nesting material in it, a few Barn Owl feathers as well, but no sign of anything nesting, and the lack of pellets suggest that it is not being used as a roost by them. The next box, in the fields to the south west of the farm, was much more encouraging. When visiting a box, one of us will hold a large hand net over the entrance and exit hole, just in case there is an adult in the box. We were lucky: a female Barn Owl flew out and straight into the net. She had not been ringed, so we ringed her, weighed and measured her, and she flew off around the field before landing in a tree close by. We weren’t by the nest for long: there were three small downy chicks and one warm egg in the box. I will revisit in three to four weeks to check on progress and ring the chicks.

As we approached the next box an adult Jackdaw flew out and, needless to say, inside the box were three Jackdaw chicks. At this age, no matter what the species, the young tend to remain sleepy; if not being fed then why waste energy:

Jackdaw pullus, Coloeus monedula

The last box we checked lies to the east of the farm. This one also had Jackdaw chicks in it. These are much further advanced:

As you can see, it was delighted to get its bit of bling. These will fledge in the next week or so. After they have fledged I will clean out the box and hope that it will be used for second brood Barn Owls.

These four were all that I planned to do for today and I am pretty happy with the results so far. The best thing about this afternoon, apart from the Barn Owl brood, was that the fields have dried out sufficiently for my car to access them. It might be a 4×4 but it is most definitely not an off-roader. No more route marches with all of the equipment and the ladder to get to the boxes! Hooray!