It's a Siskin year!!

 In recent years I've posted quite a few comments about how our member Pat, who lives west of Welshpool, catches big numbers of Siskin in his garden. As an aside, here is a picture he sent a few days ago of a patch of lawn under his feeder....

A mouth-watering selection of Siskin, Chaffinch and Brambling! He sends these to the group now and then just to make the rest of us envious......

But over recent weeks, many of us have found numbers of Siskin visiting out feeders. Every now and then there is an expansion of the population and/or a crash in their natural food availability and they seek food in gardens. So over the last 2 weeks team members have caught several hundred of these delightful birds. A small clue as to their origins came from a bird we caught at our Kingswood Trust site, which was carrying a ring which had been put on 3 years ago just outside Inverness.!

Alongside Siskins, there are often numbers of another small finch, Redpolls. At a ringing demonstration last weekend at Jubilee Wood, we caught 40 Siskin and a dozen Redpoll---but one of the Redpoll was quite special. It was greyer, and bigger than 'our' Redpoll and it had a noticeably pale rump--which you can see on this picture...

Redpolls have a complex genetic system where birds from different areas of their wide breeding range, look slightly different. This bird was one of the Scandinavian race, called either a 'Common', or sometimes 'Mealy' Redpoll--from who knows where?

Paul is tearing his hair out at the spinner feeding stations at BPF, because he's getting good numbers of farmland finches and buntings coming ti feed, but the weather has been either too wet, windy or bright to catch many of them. However, he has caught a few such as this female Linnet

And this male Reed Bunting which illustrates an issue which I have posted previously....

We are almost into the breeding season and this male is almost showing its full breeding plumage -especially the black head. However, you can see that the black feathers actually have brown tips, which during the winter hide the black and prevent any bickering between males as they feed in flocks to find food. The brown tips wear off so that as w get to spring the birds then start to compete for females--clever eh?