Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond

Anyone who read my blog post about the session on the 21st July will know that this is my first time back since then, in what in previous years has been one of my two main ringing sites. After the trouble on that occasion, I agreed with the Trust that it would be safest to stay away from public areas when working solo. Fortunately, as lockdown has eased, I am able to bring my trainees out with me and, with the Trust agreeing that I can close off specific areas from the public, using signage that they suggested (bigger, brighter than the BTO signs, much less easy to pretend you haven’t seen them) Lucy and I ventured out to Ravensroost Woods this morning. For those that know the Woods, we set just 6 nets: 4 x 18m along ride R28 and 2 x 189m along ride R38. For those who don’t know the wood, these are the first cross rides running west to east off the main path and tend to be the most productive rides. You can see where on the map of the site on the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust’s website.

https://www.wiltshirewildlife.org/ravensroost-wood-including-avis-distillery-and-warbler-meadows-malmesbury

As we weren’t setting much net, we had a late start, at 7:00, and started catching straight away. At 9:00 we had a large catch based around a mixed flock of titmice and Goldcrests. Thereafter the catch was slow: just 2 to 3 birds per round. Although it was a bright sunny day, the east wind dropped the temperature down and it never felt warm at all during the session. I suspect that this was a key reason why the movement was so slow. We did end up with a total of 45 birds, Lucy got to process her first Nuthatch, and we caught and processed a juvenile Marsh Tit, so it was a decent session. Once again, the largest portion of the catch was Goldcrests.

The list for the day was: Nuthatch 2; Treecreeper 1; Blue Tit 3(3); Great Tit 6(1); Coal Tit 1; Marsh Tit 1; Long-tailed Tit 4(1); Wren 2; Robin 4(1); Blackbird 1; Chiffchaff 1; Goldcrest 12; Chaffinch 1. Totals: 39 birds ringed from 13 species and 6 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 45 birds processed from 13 species.

Although I did lure for them, there was no sign of any Redwing, Siskin or Lesser Redpoll this morning. Early days yet. though.

As to the previous incident, I can say more now. Not content with damaging a net that will cost me over £100 to replace, the vandals then made a malicious and vexatious complaint about me to the BTO. That is why I got the police involved: I was prepared to swallow the cost as an occupational hazard until they tried to attack my licence to practice. I am pleased to say that the police have taken the criminal damage seriously, have identified one of them, and are pursuing that person for restitution for the damage they caused. I did have independent witnesses to their activities (which they admitted to the BTO in their complaint, I have a copy of their email with their details redacted – but they lied, saying I had no signs up (how did they know to complain to the BTO if they hadn’t read it on my signs?)) and I bumped into the witnesses again this morning. I am delighted to say that they immediately agreed to make statements to the police supporting the facts of what happened. With their permission, I have passed their details on to the case officer.

I am not vindictive, and would have dropped it if they had not complained to the BTO, I would drop it now if they would pay to replace the net they damaged, which they told the BTO they would do, until they found out how expensive the equipment was that they damaged. The ramifications of their ignorant actions are significant. I have been running a project in Ravensroost Woods for over 8 years, providing data about the birdlife in the wood and charting how it has changed over time for the Trust and as part of a wider project covering the whole of the Braydon Forest for both the Trust and Forestry England. This year I have missed almost the entire breeding season’s data from Ravensroost Woods, thanks to Covid-19 and then their interference. Embedded within that is an important part of the monitoring project I am running across the whole of the Braydon Forest, studying the population of the red-listed and declining Marsh Tit, Poecile palustris. The Trust has been very supportive and helpful throughout, the police have been excellent and I am extremely grateful to both: unfortunately, I cannot say the same for all involved.

Things are beginning to return to some sort of normality (at last). Today I had my second session with Lucy and my first with Alice since the lockdown, as she has returned to the area to start her PhD.

Webb’s Wood was the next on the list for a session and, with wind being forecast, a woodland site made sense. We arrived on site at 6:30 and had the nets open by 7:30. The first birds arrived soon after, but it was very slow throughout the morning. Unfortunately, although the sun did keep putting in an appearance, the place just never really warmed up and the activity levels were very low. It seemed that each round delivered just two birds: one each for Alice and Lucy to process.

I put on lures for Chiffchaff and Blackcap, to see if there were any still around (they weren’t), and also for Redwing, to see if any had arrived yet (they haven’t). It wasn’t just wishful thinking: one has been caught on this date in the last two years, both at Somerford Common, and we can expect them to arrive in numbers during the course of this month.

The catch for the day was: Blue Tit 1; Great Tit 1; Coal Tit 2; Long-tailed Tit 1(1); Wren 2; Robin (1); Blackbird 1; Goldcrest 11(2). Totals: 19 birds ringed from 7 species and 4 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 23 birds processed from 8 species.

We had a good haul of Goldcrests again. I don’t lure for them until after 10:00, to give them time to forage and feed up after the night time. All bar one of them that we caught today weighed over 5g, so it looks as if most are on track to get to the weight they will need for the winter period.

The wind started to really get up at about 10:30, so we closed and took down the exposed nets first, finally leaving site just before midday. It is fairly typical of a session at this time of year: in between migrants, and no feeding stations set up yet. Still, an enjoyable session and very pleased with the skills and application of my two recent recruits.

This was my first taster session with my potential new trainee, Lucy Mortlock. Lucy has spent the last good few months in Northern Ireland, ringing mainly waders. It has been such a civilised experience that she had forgotten all of the joys of ringing titmice! Time for a reminder.

We set just a few nets at the main crossroads in the northern woodland:

This area can be a bit variable, usually producing 30 to 40 birds but just occasionally producing close to 100. Things did not start too auspiciously. We had the nets open by 7:30 and first round delivered a Robin and a Goldcrest. The second round a new Marsh Tit and a Blue Tit. Next round another new Marsh Tit, Blue Tit and a Song Thrush. We then had the odd bird turn up: a few Goldcrests being the highlight. It really did look like it was going to be very slow session.

Steph arrived (with 18 month old Beatrice) at 9:15 after the school run, and we processed another few birds in the next few rounds. Just when I was ready to throw in the towel, at 10:45, a significant tit flock arrived, together with another bunch of Goldcrests. Lucy has certainly been well and truly initiated into the “delights” of extracting and ringing Blue Tits! Not only that but Beatrice was saying “Blue Tit” quite clearly by the time she and Steph had to leave at 11:30. Her first bird name!

The morning’s catch was: Treecreeper 1; Blue Tit 19(1); Great Tit 3(2); Coal Tit 6; Marsh Tit 2; Wren (1); Robin 1; Song Thrush 1; Blackbird (1); Goldcrest 10(1). Totals: 43 birds ringed from 8 species; 6 birds retrapped from 5 species, making 49 birds processed from 10 species.

As on Monday, lots of Nuthatch calling but not getting into the nets. Very enjoyable, and I am sure that Lucy will make a great addition to the team.

After nearly 3 days of often torrential rain, there was a weather window predicted for Monday morning, with the rain closing in again at lunchtime. It was forecast to be breezy from the west, so I chose a site in which the rides run north to south, with a good thick tree barrier to protect the nets from billowing. As I had already arranged to go to Red Lodge on Wednesday, it had to be the Firs, also known as the Braydon Bog!

I was rather interested to see what impact the rain had had on the underfoot conditions. All I can say is that the summer has clearly been exceptionally dry: the central glade just wasn’t muddy. I am told that the bottom of the site is reverting to type, so I am sure it won’t be long before we are sliding our way along the net rides.

As it was a spur of the moment decision, I worked solo. Just 7 nets: 6 x 18m and 1 x 12m set in two groups of 3 x 18m in one and the rest in the other, covers the whole of the lower part of the central glade.

It was very much typical of this time of year: a straggling summer migrant that might be staying over, a Chiffchaff, and no sign of any winter migrants yet. I played lures for Redwing, Siskin and Lesser Redpoll all to no avail!

Whilst I was setting up there were at least three Tawny Owls calling around the wood. The rest of the morning was punctuated by Nuthatches calling: an absolute, wonderful cacophony, only this time none made it into the nets!

It was good, reasonably busy, session absolutely dominated by Blue and Great Tits. I have spent a lot of time looking at moult in the last couple of years and Monday morning provided the first case of aberrant moult I have seen in a Blue Tit:

For those who aren’t ringers or know about moult, after breeding adults of most species undergo a moult. Some moult everything, others just do partial moult, but the one thing that virtually all of them do, is moult their flight feathers. They have been in place since the previous year and are pretty worn out by the time their young have fledged. Passerines generally have 10 primaries, the outer flight feathers, and they moult from the innermost outwards, as a general rule. This Blue Tit has moulted and renewed it outer 7 primary feathers before moulting the inner 3 primaries. One is actually missing, one is two-thirds grown and the other is three-quarters grown. Quite unusual.

The list for the day was: Blue Tit 15(3); Great Tit 13(1); Marsh Tit (2); Long-tailed Tit 2; Wren 1(1); Blackbird 4; Chiffchaff 1; Goldcrest 6; Chaffinch 1. Totals: 43 birds ringed from 8 species and 7 birds retrapped from 4 species, making 50 birds processed from 9 species.

In order to avoid the threatened rain, I started packing up at 11:30, even though the sky was clear and blue with just a few clouds. As I was just about finished a couple of the staff members from the Wildlife Trust’s Well-being group turned up, along with a minibus full of children from one of the local schools. A shame I had nothing left to show them, as it always gets a good response.

I left the site at 12:15 and, doubly unlucky for the schoolchildren, as I got home the promised rain arrived!

An excellent month for birds this September.  It was our second highest catch for any month since the group gained its current structure in January 2013.  The highest was October last year: there’s a challenge. I think that the key to it is how the C-permit holders, since lockdown prevented us working together, have got into working independently so more sessions are being carried out. I also found myself doing more sessions because of the weather.  So often in the last couple of months my regular Saturday / Wednesday routine has become Saturday / Monday or Tuesday / Thursday or Friday. As a result we did 28 full sessions between us last month.  Compare that with last year when, admittedly, the weather was rubbish, Jonny, Ellie and I were on Skokholm Island for the first week, and between us the group only managed 10 full sessions.  Funnily enough, they were pretty strong sessions, averaging out at 60+ birds per session whereas this year it averages out at just 44+ birds per session.

The results were:

The variety in the catch is very clear: 41 species as opposed to 32 last year.  There were huge increases in the numbers of Blackcap and Chiffchaff in the catch. This seems to have been the story across the most of the country this year as the summer visitors are leaving our shores. Pretty striking also is the increase in the Dunnocks caught: 2.5 times that of last year but, of course, that is in line with the increased number of sessions.  Indisputable in their increase is the arrival of Meadow Pipits at Blakehill Farm.  109 of them caught in a single session on the 21st of the month.  This was our single largest catch of the month, with a total of 137 birds caught between myself and Jonny.  Meadow Pipit numbers at the coastal observatories have been absolutely huge so far this year. We estimated that there had to be at least 300 flying around Blakehill that day.  They do seem to be mainly focused on the plateau which, like last year, is absolutely heaving with crane flies.

Kestrels are elusive so catching one at Blakehill Farm was a real bonus.  Despite the fact that since January 2013 we have only caught 5: 3 at Blakehill, 1 at Tedworth and 1 at Battlesbury,  I am just so generous, despite have only ever ringed two of them in my 11 year career to date, I let Andrew ring the bird.  That didn’t stop me becoming the victim of its remarkably efficient tearing beak.  The wound has finally healed!

Our most exciting catch of the month came at New Zealand Farm on the 14th.  Andrew had started to utilise the site in May. It had lain dormant for 18 months, and had only been ringed 7 times since 1st January 2015, so it is an ideal site for someone with a C-permit to manage and use.  As we know that the catches on the site can be pretty big, Jonny, Ellie and I tagged along to help out.  It was a super morning, 103 birds caught; but what was particularly good was that I was given a lure for House Martin. Whilst Jonny and I have ringed a few at Ravensroost Meadow, neither Ellie nor Andrew had them on their list and none had previously been caught at NZF.  The lure worked beautifully: we had hundreds of both Swallow and House Martin circulating over the scrub, and managed to attract down 30 of the latter and several of the former. 

October of last year was our biggest ever month. Whether we will match it is debatable. Ellie and I are still working out a safe way for us to start using Ravensroost Woods again, and it probably also depends upon how many sessions we manage, and how many Meadow Pipits we catch, at Blakehill Farm.  It is turning into an even better year for the group than the last, and that was stellar for us.

After the excellent sessions we have had on the eastern side of Blakehill Farm, particularly with the Meadow Pipit catch last time out, I decided to have a go on the farm side of the site today. It is never going to deliver the volume of birds that we get on the plateau, being more traditional farm pasture, but we usually guarantee a House Sparrow or two. I also wanted to see whether the Meadow Pipits were as abundant over this side as they are on the plateau. I was working solo, so kept to the one field and a manageable number of nets.

The catch started really well: with 10 birds in the T-junction ride in the second round, and then it died a death. With the exception of one additional Chiffchaff, they didn’t catch another bird. Most unusual. The following rounds produced just one or two birds each time.

However, the Mipit triangle started catching, two at a time. Funnily enough, the first four out of the net came from the outside, birds caught as they were flying in. Usually the birds fly in to the lure and are caught when you run at the nets and the birds panic and fly into the net when trying to escape. Otherwise, because they fly slowly and have good eyesight, they will fly up and over your nets. As I am now slow and cumbersome, with a dodgy ankle to boot, I watched several Meadow Pipits do exactly that!

As a bit of a different “treat”, five of the first ten birds were Blue Tits! That is my biggest catch of them since the 7th September.

The list for the session was: Blue Tit 4(1); Wren 1; Dunnock 2; Meadow Pipit 6; Robin 2(2); Blackbird 1; Great Tit (1); Blackcap 2; Chiffchaff 2; House Sparrow 1. Totals: 21 birds ringed from 9 species and 4 birds retrapped from 3 species, making 25 birds processed from 10 species.

I packed up at midday. As I was leaving site I was treated to sightings of a couple of Stonechat in the peri track hedgerows and a solitary Wheatear that displayed nicely in front of the car. One day I will catch one at Blakehill Farm!

My last three sessions at Lower Moor Farm have delivered 40 to 50 birds per session, so I was looking forward to a decent haul this morning. Arriving on site at 6:30 I set up my two usual net sets: 2 x 18m along the stream side and 3 x 18m along the lakeside. There is plenty of evidence of their activity around the site but this is only the second time I have seen one here.

As I was setting up the lakeside net ride I heard some very obvious and very loud tail slapping. Just down from me, close in to the side of Mallard Lake, was a Beaver, which had clearly decided I was a predator. It swam off and disappeared behind the Cormorant roost island.

With our current mini-obsession with Meadow Pipits, I set a Pipit triangle at the end of the lakeside net ride and put the lure on. The only previous time I had caught Meadow Pipits at Lower Moor Farm was at this time in 2014 when I caught 29. Unfortunately, the field where I caught them is currently playing host to a number of Belted Galloways and also has a public footpath across it and, as I have made clear, I am avoiding setting nets in public areas for the foreseeable future and will certainly not do so when working solo. It was not particularly productive. Over the course of the morning I saw just 3 Meadow Pipits and caught 1. You could call it a 33.33% success rate, which I would be very happy with if there were 300 Meadow Pipits flying around.

It was symptomatic of the whole session and, instead of the hoped for 40+ birds, I caught the princely total of 8 birds from 7 species. These were: Treecreeper (1); Blue Tit (1); Great Tit 1; Meadow Pipit 1; Robin (1); Blackbird 1; Blackcap 2.

I am sure that the issue was the cold! The north wind shall blow and we didn’t have snow because that would have warmed it up! It finally started to warm up at 10:00 but one of the rides stayed in shade and cold all morning. There were no insects flying around until about 10:30.

Not to say it wasn’t a very pleasant morning. Lots of people stopped by to see what was going on and came by for a chat. This included one of the lecturers in ecology and environmental studies from Oxford-Brookes University. He has spent some time with Matt Prior on his Tree Sparrow project and we will be arranging some sessions for him to bring students along to once life returns to normal.

This is a blog by Jonny Cooper

Of all my sites Meadow Farm is the one I try to ring at consistently across the year. I aim to undertake 2 sessions each month, setting the nets in the same positions each time. This allows comparisons to be made across years, and has allowed a good picture of the bird life at the site during the two and a half years of ringing there.

On Tuesday I was due to undertake a session and I dutifully set up all the normal nets. The session itself was pretty typical, if a little quiet, for the site. Overall, 33 birds were caught, consisting of a mix of resident and migrant species. The catch for the day was as follows: Blue Tit 1(1), Great Tit 2(4), Wren 1(2), Dunnock 1(1), Meadow Pipit 2, Cetti’s Warbler (1), Blackcap 3, Chiffchaff 11, Greenfinch 2 and Goldfinch 1. A total of 24 birds ringed from 9 species and 9 re-traps from 4 species, making 33 birds processed from 11 species. 

One thing I noticed was that part of the field had been turned over for re-seeding and there were good numbers of Meadow Pipit using the area. I was unprepared for catching them, as I had no lure and no Mipit triangle set up. However, two of them found their way into the nets, representing the first 2 Meadow Pipits caught at the site.

I packed up and left the site but couldn’t get the thought of coming back and trying for some Meadow Pipit out of my mind.

The next morning I returned armed with the Meadow Pipit lure we use when catching at Blakehill. I set up a Mipit triangle, put the lure on and waited. The first round produced 11 Meadow Pipit and a Grey Wagtail and from then until 10am each round yielded a few more Meadow Pipit. In total I caught 49 Meadow Pipit and 1 Grey Wagtail.

So across the 2 days, 83 birds from 12 species were processed. It was very satisfying to be able to try something new and for it to work. I will be trying it again.

This is a blog from our newest group member, one of my C-permit holders Alice Edney.

A long time ago (i.e. early 2020), in a land far far away (i.e. Wiltshire), I remember telling Simon that I would be disappearing for all of May to help monitor storm-petrels in the mid-Atlantic. Evidently, that did not happen. Fast-forward many months to the 12^th August and there I was at Stansted airport about to board a plane to Terceira, Azores – to say I was excited would be an understatement.  

The purpose of the trip was to assist Hannah Hereward, a PhD student at Cardiff University, with data collection for her PhD. Hannah is researching ‘The conservation implications of climatic and tropic drivers of population change in the Monteiro’s Storm-petrel and its sister species’, and to do so requires travelling to a remote islet in the Azores Archipelago where both species breed. As a brief background, two seasonally distinct breeding populations of Hydrobates storm-petrels have been known in the Azores since 1996; however, they were only formally recognised as separate species in the late 2000s (Bolton et al. 2008). The breeding period (from first egg laid to last chick fledged) of the hot season species, Monteiro’s storm-petrel Hydrobates monteiroi, is May to early October, compared to October to mid-April for the cold season species, Madeiran storm-petrel Hydrobates castro (Bolton et al. 2008). Our fieldwork would observe the end of the Monteiro’s breeding season and start of the Madeiran’s, with the primary aim of recording the fledging of the Monteiro’s chicks.

With this in mind, we started each day by conducting a nest check. The storm-petrels breed in natural crevices across the islet but also utilise artificial nests, which were installed to offer additional breeding sites and enable easier and more consistent monitoring. As a minimum, we checked the artificial nests containing a chick each day, although we also checked every artificial and known natural nest at least twice during our stay. We measured chick wing length, tarsus length and weight, which provided information on chick growth, and also took measurements of any adults found in the nests. Watching the chicks develop and change from tiny balls of floof (not dissimilar to the contents of a hoover bag) into sleek adult-like birds was wonderful, and I think we all felt a bit like proud parents whenever one fledged. Some of the chicks still had a fair bit of growing to do when we left the islet, but hopefully they will fledge over the coming weeks.

Alongside the nest checks, we deployed internal and external cameras on some of the nests to better understand the behaviours and interactions of the birds. Storm-petrels are nocturnal and so, to really get an insight into their breeding life, we needed to be able to watch them at night. The cameras were a great success and allowed us to observe innumerable behaviours, including chick preening, feeding, and fledging. On occasion we found a Monteiro’s chick outside its nest during the day and then a Madeiran adult inside the nest. Watching a small number of ‘our’ chicks be evicted by the Madeiran adults was difficult, but we could not interfere with the course of nature. Thankfully, one chick that was found injured on several occasions (and became a personal favourite, #107) went on to successfully fledge.

As mentioned, working with nocturnal species means there is only so much data you can gather during the day, and indeed the best time to observe the storm-petrels was at night. As the sun started to set in the evening, the storm-petrels would return from sea. The air became alive with magical, fairy-like creatures twisting and turning, this way and that, and their mysterious songs filled the gloom. The night work was definitely some of my favourite whilst on the islet.

We successfully deployed and retrieved two GPS tags over the course of four nights and spent a further four nights mist-netting.

The GPS work has been neatly summarised in the following video https://twitter.com/HannahHereward/status/1301162264309968896, so I will spare the detail here; however, the severe lack of sleep was worth it for the tracks we obtained. Mist netting allowed a bit more sleep, as we were normally done by midnight as opposed to 6 am, although it was far more active. Running up and down to extract birds from the net every few minutes was a good workout, especially when a Cory’s Shearwater went in and needed removing ASAP. Having ringed a good number of Manx Shearwater on Skokholm Island last summer, I was familiar with handling this group of birds, but a Cory’s was quite something. A bit like a Manx Shearwater on steroids, they were larger, stronger and had a very powerful bill, which left a nice bruise upon contact. Like the storm-petrels, they too breed on the islet, and there was even one nesting in a burrow about a metre from my tent. At first, sleeping in the tent was somewhat difficult – the Cory’s crazy calls made it sound like we were under alien attack – but I soon got used to it, or else became too tired for it to keep me awake. Other seabird species on the islet included Common Tern and at least one Sooty Tern, and on our penultimate night we were lucky enough to hear, and then see, a Barolo’s Shearwater! This species breeds on the islet over winter, so it was amazing to have one return so early.

Overall, I had an incredible experience in the Azores, and am very grateful to have been able to do fieldwork in such an uncertain time, and with two amazing people. Hannah and Max (the other field assistant) were great fun and together we managed to achieve a lot in a fairly short time period. Coming back to the UK has been unsurprisingly disheartening, but I am looking forward to returning to Wiltshire soon and resuming ringing with Simon and the team.

More details about Hannah’s fieldwork can be found on her blog: https://musingsofamaroonedphdstudent.home.blog/.

I started ringing at Blakehill Farm in 2014. In those days the central plateau was cut in late July, after any Curlew would have fledged, for hay or silage. Meadow Pipits were regularly caught in small numbers, but the largest catch we had in the years up to and including 2016 was 8 birds. In 2017 the regime changed and the plateau, whilst grazed by cattle in the growing season, is left uncut throughout the rest of the year. As a result, every autumn since there has been a huge irruption of insects, particularly crane flies. Since then September has been a key month for the species at this site. In 2017 we caught 45 birds in two sessions (28 and 17); in 2018 it was 112 (93 and 19); not so many in 2019: 79 (32 and 47). Today we caught 109 of them in our one session. This is the single largest catch since the group split at the beginning of 2013: it is also the second largest catch ever of the species by the group since 2000. The only larger catch was around the filter beds at the Marlborough Sewage Works back in December 2010. That site went with the North Wilts group.

Jonny Cooper and I started early, setting the nets adjacent to the plateau bushes from 5:30. We had them open by the time it got light. We then set up what is known in the trade as a Mipit triangle. This is three 12m nets set in a, surprise, surprise, open triangle. An MP3 player is set at the back of the triangle with Meadow Pipit call playing. It is a very effective catching method. However, if we caught all of the birds that come and sit on the top string of the nets we would probably triple the catch. It was very effective, although there were so many flying around that we caught them in all of our plateau nets.

The other significant catch was a single bird: a House Martin. The first we have caught there in 5 years. They have never been abundant at the site, where Swallows appear in great numbers. We had only caught 2 prior to this date: both in September, one in 2014 and the other in 2015, so this is a pretty special bird for us – it came to the same lure that we used at New Zealand Farm last Monday.

Last year was our first blank year for Whinchat since we caught them for the first time in 2015. We had 2 at the end of August, another 2 at the last session and 5 more today. Clearly they are still coming through on migration. Stonechat numbers are on a par with previous years. We also had a small fall of Chiffchaff, all juveniles.

The list for the session was: House Martin 1; Blue Tit 2; Meadow Pipit 109; Stonechat 3; Whinchat 5; Chiffchaff 9; Reed Bunting 7(1). Totals: 136 birds ringed from 7 species and 1 bird retrapped.

Even the retrap was of interest: it was a Reed Bunting, but not on our rings. Most often they have flown over from the Cotswold Water Park, but the details have not yet been entered into the online database. I shall look forward to finding out where it was ringed.