Lots of group activities!!

 With the onset of autumn and the influx of new birds it's time to target new species. Pete has a long-standing site which is very good for Redwings from now until Christmas time; so he has been out most mornings and has already topped 100 birds with the hope of catching many more--there is still a lot to learn about the travels of these birds. A couple of days ago however, as well as plenty of Redwings Pete was really pleased to see a most unexpected bird in the net......

Of course this is a magnificent Green Woodpecker. We don't catch many of these-in fact in over 40 years of ringing I've only ever caught 1 and that was a long time ago--so this is a pretty special bird!! Pete will carry on his efforts and give our trainees some great experiences at handling mainly Redwing.

Another of our team Emma has a site at the zoo where she works and she has had a couple of nice sessions recently having the excitement of handling a Jay ( and keeping all her fingers....) and a couple of Redwing.

The group has also re-started with the autumn and winter bird survey in a joint venture with the WMBC to provide a major new farm with a baseline survey of birds in order to help them develop a plan to improve things. Our first survey showed a couple of stubble fields with good numbers of Skylarks and Meadow Pipits. So a couple of nights ago we started the programme of thermal imaging to try and catch and ring these species. It was a really successful evening with 8 Skylark and 2 Meadow Pipits ringed but the star bird was  Jack Snipe found by a small wet patch in the field. As well as ringing we also provide the farmer with the numbers seen on these fields to complement the daytime counts we do. For example we didn't see any Jack Snipe during the day.

They are cracking little birds and knowing that the absolute nearest they have come from is the taiga forest of Norway makes them doubly exciting.

Here's one of the Meadow Pipits too.

Finally while on the subject of Jack Snipe, I recently visited our prime site for this species and found 8 birds so they are arriving for the winter. I was fortunate to be invited to present a paper on using thermal imaging to census Jack Snipe, to the International Wader Study Group. This is THE group studying waders and has about 600 members from 57 countries--so it was a pretty nerve wracking event. Sadly it was from my spare room on Zoom rather than from the original pre-Covid venue in Germany. Anyway it seems to have gone down well and I've had contacts as a result from all the home countries as well as Finland, Lithuania and New Zealand. I'll be reporting soon on how the numbers of Jack Snipe are doing at our site.