Ringing In The Braydon Forest & Beyond

Lower Moor Farm is my Constant Effort Site (CES) that I have run for the last five years. We have never missed a session. Unfortunately, as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, this year’s CES is not going to be comparable with previous years: we have already missed session 1 and, due to the need to isolate from the general public, my activities are restricted to the nets in the Wildlife Refuge area, which is not open to the general public. This has reduced the number of nets I use to less than half (5 as opposed to 12). They were set up in 2 rides: one of 2 x 18 metre nets running along the boundary brook side and the other of 3 x 18 metre nets running along the edge of Mallard Lake.

I had forgotten what it was like to get up quite so early (3:45, since you ask) and how much work is involved in setting up nets when working solo (social distancing has made group ringing a thing of the past for now). When you add in that my key and the padlock on the gate decided not to talk to each other, so I had to heave my equipment over the 5-bar gate and, even worse, heave my ancient, overweight carcass and arthritic right ankle over that same gate half-a-dozen times, it wasn’t the most auspicious start. To cap it all: the entire front bumper assembly of my car decided to deposit itself on the grass. It turns out that when, after an accident a couple of years ago, the front end was replaced the repairers omitted to put in the retaining screws. Two full services by a Ford main dealer also failed to pick that up so I am very lucky it dropped off when it did and not when I was speeding down the M4 to Bristol or similar! Words will be exchanged!

Despite all of that, I had a pretty decent session. Both nets caught well and I had a good variety of birds. I did a walk around the outside of the ringing area on Tuesday, just to see what was going on, and mapped four Cetti’s Warbler territories, so I was hoping to find a couple more within the refuge area. My first round delivered a male in net 4, my second round a female in net 5, my fourth round a recaptured bird, ringed as an adult last year. So three Cetti’s was a good start. From the results today and the walk on Tuesday, I am pretty confident that there are seven Cetti’s territories in that part of the reserve. That is significantly higher than in previous years.

There was a steady trickle of birds throughout the morning but by 8:30 it had quietened down a lot so I decided, rashly, to set up three more nets (one each of 9 metres, 12 metres and 18 metres) further along the boundary brook side. It always looks as if it should catch really well, it rarely does. In fact, all I got for me efforts were the exercise in putting them up, walking over to check them half-a-dozen times or so, and then taking them down again! It is amazing I manage to remain so cheerful. Fortunately, there was a late surge of catches in the other nets, with a pair of Garden Warblers (I say “pair” knowing that the connotation is not proven, but two birds of different sexes of the same species in the same net, less than 12″ apart, is pretty good circumstantial evidence) and a male Reed Bunting as my last catch of the morning.

The list for the day was: Great Spotted Woodpecker 1; Blue Tit (1); Great Tit 2; Long-tailed Tit (1); Dunnock 2(2); Robin 3(1); Blackbird (1); Cetti’s Warbler 2(1); Blackcap 6(1); Garden Warbler 2(1); Lesser Whitethroat (1); Chiffchaff 1(2); Bullfinch 1; Reed Bunting 1. Totals: 21 birds ringed from 10 species; 12 birds retrapped from 10 species, making 33 birds processed from 14 species.

There was no sign of young warblers yet but one of the Dunnocks and two of the Robins ringed were fresh out of the nest. Next session there should be a generous sprinkling of young Titmice as well as, potentially, some early Blackcap and Chiffchaff young.

Both the Bullfinch and the Reed Bunting were handsome, striking males and were almost the highlight of the session. The real highlight was something I didn’t manage to catch. At about 7:30 I started to hear this call that I couldn’t place. It sounded a bit like an animal being predated and calling out in pain. After a couple of text messages with Jonny Cooper, who was out doing his own catching, it came to me: Water Rail. This is exciting. We know that they over-winter but in the 15 years since I first visited, and the 7 years since I started ringing at, Lower Moor Farm I have never had any evidence of them being around in the summer and potentially breeding on site.

It got very hot about 10:30 so I started to pack away and cleared the site by 11:30. One of the benefits of setting only a few nets: packing up is pretty quick. So, an eventful and interesting session.

The following blog piece is by Jonny Cooper.

Following changes to the UK’s lockdown restrictions, and a subsequent efficient review of these changes by the BTO with Natural England and the JNCC, ringing in England has been permitted since Wednesday. Of course, social distancing rules must be adhered to at all times, and the landowners must be happy for ringing to be undertaken at this time. This change offered me my first opportunity in nearly 2 months to undertake some ringing away from the garden, so I headed to my ever-reliable site at Meadow Farm.

Since my last session at the site in March the summer migrants have arrived across the country in force, and many resident birds are well into the breeding season, so I was optimistic about what I might find. The weather forecast was for a calm and overcast morning with temperatures reaching the mid-teens by lunchtime. The board was set, it was time to start moving the pieces.

The first round at 5:45 produced 13 birds including several summer migrants. From then on each round consistently produced 5 – 10 birds across the morning. The list for the session is as follows:

Kingfisher 1(1), Great Spotted Woodpecker (3), Treecreeper (1), Blue Tit (3), Great Tit 2(3), Long-tailed Tit 1(1), Wren 2(2), Dunnock 3(3), Robin 2(2), Song Thrush 1, Blackbird (2), Sedge Warbler 1, Reed Warbler 3(3), Blackcap 5(1), Garden Warbler 2, Whitethroat 1, Chiffchaff 2(1), Chaffinch (1), Greenfinch 3(3) and Goldfinch 1(3).  30 birds ringed from 15 species, 33 re-traps from 16 species, making a total of 63 birds processed from 20 species.

The Kingfishers are the nineteenth ringed and the eighth re-trapped birds at the site since the first was caught in August 2018. A phenomenal number given the small size of the site. However, they were trumped today by the Garden Warblers: the two birds processed represent the first records for the site. An additional highlight was the re-trapping of three Reed Warblers, one Blackcap and one Chiffchaff that were ringed on-site last year. A nice example of site fidelity amongst these migrant birds.

Aside from ringing, I was treated all morning to a Cuckoo calling in the trees around me.  At one point a second male joined him and they began to chase each other. The reason for this soon became clear when a female Cuckoo appeared and stared making the distinctive ‘bubbling call’.  Also, I heard a Cetti’s Warbler singing for the first time on the site. Two birds were ringed last year in September, so hopefully the species is starting to colonise.

I finished packing up about 1pm, I was about to leave when I was treated to a Grass Snake sliding across the path in front of me. Another first for the site. Overall, it was as good a mornings ringing as I could have hoped for, made even better by the wider cast of wildlife found on site. Well worth the wait.

The regular readers of the blog will know that between 23^rd March and 13^th May all ringing away from a ringer’s place of residence was suspended, as part of the effort to control the spread of Covid-19.   I have done a few reports on the activities in my Purton garden.  The following account is by Jonny Cooper whose garden is a suburban Chippenham garden and makes a nice contrast between my village location and his.  This is his account:

I, like almost all ringers, had to turn my focus onto the birds found in my garden.

Garden ringing is a rather different kettle of fish to the standard ringing session. Typically, nets are opened on a more ad hoc basis, with smaller numbers of birds being caught, over a longer period of time. Nevertheless, ringing in the garden can turn up some interesting birds. The full list of birds processed during the period can be found below:

Woodpigeon 5(1), Blue Tit 3(6), Great Tit 5(5), Coal Tit 1(2), Long-tailed Tit 4(3), Wren 1, Dunnock 5(4), Robin 1(6), Blackbird 8(15), Blackcap 2, House Sparrow 4(1), and Goldfinch 4.  A total of 43 new from 12 species,  43 re-trap birds from 9 species, making 86 birds processed from 12 species.

The Blackcaps were a particularly interesting catch: both birds were carrying substantial reserves of fat, meaning they are likely to have been on passage heading further north. The number of Woodpigeon can be explained by the deployment of walk-in Potter traps in which I placed tasty sunflower hearts; the pigeons couldn’t get enough of them.

Now this is perhaps not the most exciting list ever produced. However, it does show the numbers and diversity of birds that will use what is a very average suburban garden and, actually, these last few weeks have made me realise that going forward, maybe I should spend more time ringing in my garden.

As previously posted, on the 19th October 2019 Dr Ian Grier and Andy Palmer caught an unusual warbler on the Salisbury Plain Training Area.  They couldn’t immediately identify it, so they took photographs and extended measurements of the bird before releasing it.

I posted photographs of the bird, which sparked a lot of conversation with the consensus that it was “probably Booted”.  Unfortunately, due to a complaint to the BTO that the bird was “fluffed up and looked unwell” I had to remove the key photograph, leaving just the photo of the wing. (The BTO are extremely sensitive to the potential for harm from misused and misrepresented photographs on social media.  I fully understand why, and support them in their stance, but boy is it frustrating that a few malcontents can spoil things for the majority!)

The record was circulated around the acknowledged experts on the species and a submission made to the BBRC (several of whom were amongst the experts consulted prior to submission) based on the following table and all of the available photographs:

The details were circulated and a decision made and notified on Twitter on the 30th April 2020:

Essentially, the experts are unable to agree with absolute clarity and unanimity on the species involved and have accepted the bird as Booted / Sykes’s Warbler.  It just goes to show that, even with a bird in the hand, with plenty of photographs and a wide range of measurements, it is not a given that an absolute identification can be made.  Goodness knows how you identify with certainty either species through a pair of binoculars or a telescope.

We have added three pages to our site: Warbler Ringing Recoveries; Other Migrant Recoveries and Resident Recoveries.

Each page contains a species identifier, a map of the movements of birds recovered and a table of the recovery information.  Recoveries are numbered and correspond to the appropriate entry in the table.  Birds ringed by the group and recovered elsewhere are shown in blue, birds recovered by the group are coloured red.

Movements are, generally, of birds travelling over 50km from place of ringing to place of recovery.  Some exceptions are made for interesting recoveries, regardless of distance.

All of the hard work has been done by Jonny Cooper.

This has been mooted for a long time and is now, as a result of lockdown, being trialled within the UK: the BTO are asking us to run a constant effort site (CES) in our gardens. As you will have seen from my previous garden posts, I have a medium sized garden that attracts a reasonable number of birds and so I have volunteered to trial the scheme, whilst missing my Lower Moor Farm CES.

One of the benefits of a garden session is that you can safely set and furl your nets the day before, meaning that a 4:30 start could be avoided.  Sunday morning I was up at 5:15 and had the nets open by 5:30.  Unfortunately, the first bird was not caught until 6:30.  However, I was regaled by the dawn chorus, on International Dawn Chorus Day, whilst waiting.  A Magpie did get in the net at 6:15, but managed to extricate itself before I could get to it.

It wasn’t a huge catch but worthwhile nonetheless.  To date, in 2020, I have caught 21 Greenfinches in my garden, with three more caught on Sunday. If I compare that with last year, we caught none in the same period at any of our sites.  In 2018 we caught just the one in our northern sites, again in my garden, so our catch to date looks remarkable.  Over the last 6 years I have caught 93 Greenfinches in the garden: the vast majority, though, have been juveniles caught in the last 6 months of the year.

The actual highlight of the session was catching my first garden Stock Dove. They have been joining the Woodpigeons in the garden, to hoover up the spill from the feeders. My only concern was that they have also been joined by the odd Feral Pigeon, of the Rock Dove type and colouration, and they can look remarkably similar, apart from the wing bars.  I didn’t rush the identification and it was definitely a Stock Dove.

I also caught my fifth Woodpigeon of the year.  The list for the day was: Woodpigeon 1; Stock Dove 1; Blue Tit (1); Coal Tit (2); Blackbird 1(1): Greenfinch 3; Goldfinch 4(1).  Totals: 10 birds ringed from 5 species and 5 birds retrapped from 4 species, making 15 birds processed from 7 species.

As this was the first full month of lockdown, with everyone confined to ringing in their gardens and ringing in external sites banned, I was interested to see how we would get on.  The results were surprising: we actually ringed more birds this April than we did last, but recaptured fewer.  The big difference, unsurprisingly, was that we didn’t catch the number of migrant warblers we would normally do, being confined to our gardens. There were still some nice results though.  I haven’t done individual session statistics because, I don’t know how everybody else does it, but my back garden ringing is very ad hoc, and is rarely what I would call a formal session. For one thing, the nets tend not to be opened until after breakfast! Clearly a habit that will have to be broken post-lockdown.

It seems that Greenfinches are making something of a comeback in this area.  In my area it is pretty clear that they are very much attracted to gardens these days. However, in the Chippenham area they seem to be attracted out to the farmlands around the towns.

Actually. let me qualify that.  My garden birds: all 12 Greenfinches caught this month, were caught in my little back garden in Purton.  There are more, as I had 6 on the feeders this morning at least 3 of which were unringed. I suspect that, if I was able to get out into the surrounding farm and woodland, we would find that is where they are primarily nesting and foraging.

Goldfinch numbers were excellent (26 of the 29 in my garden – am I coming across as a bit too smug yet?) and I do know that there is a plentiful throughput of unringed birds.  I was pleased to catch my first Great Spotted Woodpecker ever in the garden this month.  They have been fairly regular visitors to the feeders but always managed to avoid the nets.  I have also managed to ring 4 Woodpigeons this month. All bar one was mist-netted in a 6m Merlin net. They aren’t the best build quality but they certainly hold larger birds well and both nets survived the encounters without damage: so pretty good for the price.  The other (finally) was caught in one of the 4 Potter traps that have been regularly ignored by them to date

Blue Tits, Great Tits, Blackbirds, Robins and House Sparrows were well represented, as one would expect in a garden-based scenario.

The last couple of weeks have been quite testing, with catches being very unpredictable.  On 3rd April I opened the nets for a couple of hours and caught the rather woeful total of 3 birds: I ringed a House Sparrow and recaptured a Blackbird and a Dunnock.

My next session was on the 8th April and was a much more rewarding effort.  The highlight of the session was my first Blackcap of the summer, but there was a reasonable amount of other activity, with 11 Goldfinch and 3 Greenfinch, a Starling and a Blackbird caught and ringed.

A brief session on the 14th April delivered 4 more Goldfinch, another Greenfinch and a Blue Tit ringed plus recaptures of a Blackbird and a Long-tailed Tit.  Prior to opening my nets that morning, whilst stood looking out of the kitchen window drinking a cup of tea,  I couldn’t help noticing that there was quite a lot of activity on the feeders which had dissipated by the time I opened my nets half-an-hour later, so I resolved to get up early and open the nets at daybreak on the Wednesday.

At 5:55 I opened the nets and watched and waited, and waited. At 6:40 a lone Starling ended up in the net.  At 7:10 it was a new Blackbird and at 7:50 a retrapped Blackbird.  The rest of the was similar, with the odd bird flying in and getting ringed. Between 8:00 and 14:30 I caught and ringed 3 Goldfinch and recaptured a Robin, and then, at 14:35 this turned up in one of my nets:

The irony of this is that I have set in my garden two walk in traps, baited with sunflower hearts and seeds, specifically for catching Woodpigeon.  They have been opened every other day and have caught not a thing, despite the pigeons walking up to them and around them but never going in.

That was it until I went to shut the nets at 18:00.  Picking up food from around the traps was this:

I have not caught many: this is only the third I have ringed and the first one I have caught since one almost exactly 4 years ago.

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.