This week illustrated just how keen members of the group are even in the face of adversity. Pete has continued to battle away at his lovely walled garden site trying to ring Redwing on most mornings ( except those with gale force winds and/or lashing rain). Returns haven't been too good with only a handful each morning but much respect for his efforts. It's probably the last he will be trying--in recent years the numbers of redwing caught seems to drop off dramatically around this time of year. But well done Pete!! Kev is finding a similar pattern at his redwing site although he's not been able to put in that much effort this week due to weather and other commitments.
As the moon waxes we are reliant on heavy cloud to provide the level of darkness which increases our productivity when out using the thermal imager. Many of the skylarks were not in their usual fields this week, and the many fieldfare were incredibly jumpy--however, teams have continued to put in the hours and a couple of woodcock, grey partridge and fieldfare have kept things ticking over.
Yesterday afternoon we assembled at Belvide to see if we could improve on our very small catch of starlings at the roost last week. There don't seem to be as many birds roosting at the moment and some birds are going into the Gazebo bay reeds rather than in front of the Scott hide. However, we had a very decent catch which-by the time we got to the nets and extracted all the birds, resulted in 27 starlings and 4 reed buntings. This was a great opportunity for us all to build on the revision we did last week on ageing and sexing and the three trainees got a decent number of birds each. Let's hope we can build on this over the coming weeks.
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