108 Not Out !!

 Team members have been hard at it over recent weeks, as I will report next--but for now I'd like to share with you our success with one species in particular-the Linnet. This is a small finch which was commonly kept as a cage bird back in the day, and one which as a group we have rarely handled in the past. However, one of our farm feeding sites has attracted a regular feeding flock and during the last few weeks we have managed to ring a substantial total of 108 Linnets!! And when I visited the feeder yesterday afternoon, there was a group of 20+ still actively feeding.

What is intriguing is where these birds are headed. There isn't any suitable breeding habitat on the farm ( this species love nesting in gorse bushes), so they must be feeding up ready for a movement to breeding grounds elsewhere. Very few of the birds are in breeding plumage-but here is an adult male which is ready to breed:-

As you can see it is a male which has a bright red breast, and a grey head. Most of the males we have been catching are juveniles ( less that one full year old), and they have not yet aquired their full breeding colours. But this next picture illustrates a more general point -especially about the way finches and buntings finally get their breeding colours:-

This young male has actually grown breast feathers which are red--but the tips of the feathers are white-why? Well most finches form gregarious feeding flocks during the winter, and juvenile ( males especially) have pale tips to many of their feathers to hide the underlying colour, to reduce aggression between males. As the Spring wears on, so these pale tips wear off to expose the colour and -hey presto!!, let breeding behaviour commence!

Just a couple of pictures to show some other features. Males and females are easy to tell apart in breeding plumage because the females don't have the red breast, but in winter plumage they are a bit more tricky. However, the colour of the wings when folded are a really good clue, as you can see in the following picture:-

The bird on the left is a male with a russet brown back, the female on the right has a streaked, grey brown back.

Finally ageing can be interesting......However, juvenile birds tend to have pointed tail feathers while adult tail feathers are slightly more rounded. Both can be seen in this picture:-

You can clearly see that most of these feathers are pointed because this is a juvenile bird. However, a closer look at the two outer tail feathers between the fingers, shows a couple of feathers which are subtely more rounded--how come? The likelihood is that somehow the juvenile outer two feathers have been lost and the bird has regrown them  and, as expected they have grown through as adult looking feathers.

More about the rest of the teams recent success soon........