Weather not kind this week

 It's been a frustrating week with the weather conspiring to either stop any activity or severely reduce success. Early morning rain and frost really hampered Pete's progress with Redwing and he ended the week with a creditable 113 new birds plus a couple of Goldcrest and a Blackbird-testament to his tenacity and effort.

Kevin also put in the effort and managed to squeeze in 3 sessions at the racecourse and 3 at a couple of farms. It's fair to say that at least two of these were a lot of effort for little reward--however he managed a creditable 50 Redwing, 5 Blackbird, 2 each of Starling, Great Tit, Yellowhammer and Fieldfare and 1 each of Dunnock, Wren and Reed Bunting.

We don't have much in the way of pictures from this week--but Kevin has sent a couple from one of his sessions:- first a juvenile male Blackbird

You can see it's a male because it's predominantly black, and juvenile because although it's yellow eye ring is almost complete, it's beak is not fully yellow--and key is that the outer wing feathers are brown because these are the feathers the bird first grew in the nest. It will moult these out into jet black feathers next autumn.

This is a Fieldfare:-

Suffice to say these are simply just stunningly beautiful birds.

Yesterday we trusted the weather forecast ( which hadn't worked earlier in the week!!) and fortunately it paid off as the rain and mizzle cleared enough for us to try again at the Starling roost. Numbers have built up this week and we were pleased to ring 43 new birds plus 6 Reed Buntings and a Redwing. Sadly none of the Starlings were carrying foreign rings but who knows where ours will distribute to next year. We will post details of our Lithuanian control when data comes through.

Here's hoping for some better weather--and what might be a purple patch for lamping as the moon phase and setting times are looking good from the end of next week.

 

SO MUCH ACTION----and a Cracker from Kaunas!!!

 Notwithstanding the lock-down, team members have been working within the guidelines and putting on a range of activities to keep our great trainees active and making progress. In summary we have ringed around 300 new birds of around 25 species this week--a remarkable effort! Activities have been of 4 main types:-

Pete and Kev have battled manfully against poor weather conditions ( windy) but have still managed to ring about 120 new Redwings this week-- Pete had now ringed almost 650 Redwings this autumn so far. It just shows what can be achieved with determination and dedication. As well as Redwing, Pete also caught a few Goldcrests and a Blackcap this week. Who knows how many of these birds winter in UK--ringing has shown that most of them have bred in eastern Europe and manage to find sufficient food here to get them through without migrating to north Africa. Pete also caught this stunning male Blackbird:-

You can tell it's a male because it is black--but you can also tell its a first year bird from the black bill, no yellow eye ring and brown outer wing feathers.

Kevin Gareth and Paul have operated at feeding stations this week with the usual (very important for trainees) array of common birds. However, K and G had a good bird this morning in the form of a Cetti's warbler--not a great looker; but a sign of the increasing colonisation of this essentially southern European species. Some early reward for the effort put in to constructing their snazzy new feeding station!!

The Cettis warbler caught this morning

The new feeding station.

Teams have also been out with the thermal imagers on several nights this week with considerable success. We have ringed over 80 Skylarks, which is impressive on it's own, but the big news this week is the arrival of Woodcock in good numbers. We have a breeding population of Woodcock in the UK, but numbers are raised massively in winter by the arrival--usually from mid November of birds from northern Europe and maybe even as far as the Urals. This week we have ringed 8 Woodcock of which one is shown :-

Tonight we added a fourth activity which is really important in a trainees progress--a Starling roost. This requires several important skills as well as extraction, ageing and sexing these superb birds. We also usually catch a few Reed Buntings ( 7 tonight) which can also be challenging to age and sex. We ended up with 18 new Starlings--a suitable number to handle--but without doubt the star bird already had a ring on it, and it was on the bird's left leg so I knew it wasn't one of ours.......................

Here's the bird--an adult male Starling:-

And here are three pictures of the ring:-

You can see this ring says

                                            '' ZOOL. MUS. KAUNAS (ie Zoological Museum of Kaunas)

                                              LITHUANIA

                                                KH 72923

So this bird was ringed in Lithania, and is spending this winter in the UK, at Belvide!! We will get further details when we have put the number through the system and we will report it here.

PS I mentioned the prospect of some pretty finches in my last post--we had to put that off for a while but we hope to have news in a couple of weeks.......

  

Back in action!!

After some debate about exactly WHERE we can ring during the lockdown, the BTO has now clarified the rules and the great news is that so long as we comply with limiting the number in effect to two people, we can continue. As readers will know we have a number of trainees and in ringing it certainly is of paramount importance for trainees to literally keep their hand in-so we are putting on as many sessions as we can and limiting attendance to 1 trainee per trainer. You'll see from the following notes that we have been pretty successful both in terms of numbers/species ringed and providing training opportunities. Just by way of providing a flavour of this, we've put on sessions at feeding stations, Redwing sites, roosts and evening thermal imaging. Within the group we've ringed 204 Redwing when according to most contacts it's not the best year for Redwing numbers. One of the exciting birds caught at these sessions was this superb juvenile male Sparrowhawk...

 

There are two clues to it being a juvenile-first the vertical blotches on the breast ( horizontal lines in an adult), and second the bright yellow iris which becomes orange in adults. We determine the sex of Sparrowhawks--like most birds of prey, on size--generally males are significantly smaller than females.

Thermal imaging sessions have been very successful--even in conditions of bright moonlight when we wouldn't normally try. However there have been a series of evenings with no moonlight recently and catches have been good as a result. One evening in particular saw us break our own record in catching 40 new Skylarks in a couple of hours. To put this in context until recently when a few of us started

using thermal imagers to help catch Skylarks, there were only around 200 caught in the whole of the UK every year!!

One of the most surprising catches however, was in a well grown crop of something where we felt we wouldn't see anything....We did see a bird, caught it and found it was this little beauty......

This is a most unexpected juvenile male Stonechat. A cracking little bird and certainly the first we have caught like this--and we'd be very surprised if anyone else has caught one of these using a thermal imager.

We are hoping to catch more Skylarks and Starlings this week--and we hope a rather pretty finch --more news on all of these later.

Bye bye for a while

Hi all--as you all know we are in Lockdown version 2 at the moment; and the full implications for our operation aren't completely clear just yet. When things are a bit clearer I will start posting again--but until then I'll sign off for a while Colin