Feeder Session

We have had a few decent sessions at a local farm feeding station over recent weeks providing our trainees with some useful extraction practice--especially tits. While this is obviously worthwhile, it is nevertheless a bit more exciting and interesting when finches start feeding in  numbers. This morning we had good numbers of Great and Blue tits as usual, but alongside these were a Blackbird, Robin and Coal tit; with 12 Goldfinch (plus a bird ringed from somewhere else-news later), and very encouragingly 2 Siskin. These typically start to attend our feeders in Spring. When they have started at feeders this early in previous years it has usually meant a good year for Siskin in that if there are big numbers in the wild they quickly denude their preferred natural food-alder seeds-and need to come into gardens to find supplementary food at feeders. We caught an adult male and an adult female. The male is shown below.