It's all a bit odd

We have now moved into August and typically we would expect migration to start to warm up--especially with a change to better weather over the last few days. So it was a bit of a disappointment on Saturday morning with absolutely perfect conditions that we struggled to a modest total.

The recent pattern of rather more Sedge Warblers that Reed Warblers continued but only one Blackcap was a real puzzle.

However, there were a couple of silver linings. First I think I have mentioned previously how exciting it is when we ring Lesser Whitethroat. We only caught one on Saturday, but we also caught a few Common Whitethroats which gave us the opportunity of showing a picture of the two to show how different they look in the field. These are both juvenile birds with the Common on the left:-

You can see how much greyer the Lesser Whitethroat is, as well as showing a kind of highwayman's mask through the eyes--with the Common wing showing lots more chestnut.

Whenever we take a bird out of a net which has already got a ring on there's a bit of a frisson of excitement. Every now and then the excitement level is raised when we spot something unusual written on the ring--as we see here on an adult Sedge Warbler:-

In the middle you can just make out the letters PAR--because this is a bird ringed in France--PAR..IS. This is great, but what is even better is the history of this bird. A female, she was first ringed as a juvenile on her first migration south at Finistere in France on 4th August 2018. ( Note how early this bird had set off --presumably from somewhere in England). On 10th July 2019, we caught the bird at Belvide, where we assume she was breeding. And now on 2nd August 2020 we have caught her again at Belvide. Again we assume she was breeding here but she must have been nesting at the other end of the reserve or else we would have expected to have caught her earlier. We released her to get on her way--Bon Voyage!!

Sunday morning saw Kevin and son Gareth operating at their racecourse site where they had a good catch of over 40 new birds, including 26 migrants of which 7 were Blackcaps--obviously not as elusive as those at Belvide!. They also ringed 7 House Sparrows-although a very familiar species we don't ring so many like this one....

Finally, Ron sent me another picture of the Swifts from last week--this one shows an even better view of the throat pouch rammed with insects ready to take back and feed to the chicks