2020 up and running!!

January 1st and our new regime of sessions specially for our great group of trainees got underway at the main Belvide feeding station. Paul and Kev were on hand with me to help and we had a good number of birds for trainee Jen to practice extraction ( lots of difficult Blue tits), ringing, ageing and sexing.
We catch a lot of Great tits at these sessions because they are regular visitors to feeders--the pictures below show how relatively easy it is to sex this species. By using the photos below you can even sex them as they perch on the feeder at your home--if you get a decent view of the belly:-

You can clearly see that the black on the belly is extensive and gets wider towards the rear end of the bird--this is a MALE, which when compared to:-

a FEMALE where the black is much weaker and fades out towards the tail.

Great Spotted Woodpeckers are always exciting to catch, and once they have moulted out their juvenile red cap, they are very easy to sex. Basically, if there is no red at the back of the head/neck then the bird is a FEMALE--as this one we caught this morning shows:-

Sexing Robins is (arguably) impossible in the hand--some research papers suggest it may be possible, but we've never found it so. Ageing is quite subtle, but once you get your eye in it's relatively easy. There area a few things to look for but the most straightforward clue is in the greater coverts:-

This is a row of feathers stretching across the middle of the wing--half way between my thumbs in the picture. You can see three of these feathers have light brown patches on them--these are un-moulted juvenile feathers which this bird has had since it left the nest last year (2019). There are other feathers in this tract closer to the body which have no light tips--these are adult type feathers which the bird has moulted in to replace juvenile pale tipped feathers. So the light tips enable us to be sure this bird was born last calendar year