Up and running!!

As we get close to the beginning of July there is always a frisson of excitement ( even after all these years of ringing!!) as we are about to embark on the new post breeding season of ringing at Belvide. Things were looking good a few weeks go because the water levels were nice and low ( willies not waders needed), and the weather was pretty good signalling a good breeding season. THEN--the deluge occurred raising the water level almost to where it was at the end of winter. In turn we were aware of the potential knock-on effects of both the increased water levels and the persistent cold wet weather on the breeding success of the breeding birds on the reserve.

We spent a couple of hours preparing the net sites on Tuesday; and caught a few birds while doing so. Then the new season officially opened at 5 am on Wednesday morning--what would we find? In short, the better than expected news was that we caught a decent number of new birds (64), within which total were encouraging numbers of juvenile breeders -especially Reed and Sedge warblers. We are hoping that these two species are still breeding and on their second or replacement broods, making use of what looks like an extended period of good weather with plenty of insect food around.
We had expected more Chiffchaff and Blackcap juveniles, but let's see what happens over the coming weeks. Main totals of new birds were:- Sedge warbler 15, Reed warbler 9, Blackcap 7, Chiffchaff 4, and Garden warbler 3--the rest was made up of resident species such as Blue and Great tits, Dunnocks and Wrens. Of course these are still important and I will provide an analysis of their breeding success in future bulletins.

Its always good to come across birds we have ringed in previous years, especially migrants, because this means they have managed the perilous journeys to and from Africa to return to Belvide to breed. We caught 15 such migrants--Reed and Sedge warblers, almost all of which were young ( ie newly hatched ) birds from 2018--even more remarkable that they carry out such long migrations with no experience!!
The final icing on the cake was the Sedge warbler pictured below. You may be able to see the ring in the first picture--and with a bit of imagination you may be able to make out the words MUSEUM PARIS, on that ring in the second picture. It will be a little while until we get the info on this bird back to us but it's almost certainly one of the large number of birds ringed by several teams of French ringers trying to study Aquatic warbler migration through several of the big estuarine complexes in northern France. We will see and report as soon as we know.

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