And----They're Off!!!

 Goodbye and good riddance 2020 !! In fairness we had a very good ringing year notwithstanding the various lock-downs and restrictions.We will be posting some of our ( many) ringing headlines in a couple of days, and shortly after that we will also post a copy of our 2020 Annual Report.

Until that data is ready, I dusted off my garden net and got the 2021 new ringing year of to a start this morning. Numbers have been building up at my feeding station so after giving many birds a chance to feed early doors, I opened my net just after 10 am. Within a couple of hours I stopped to let the birds carry on feeding but in that time I had ringed a very encouraging 25 new birds. 

11 of them were Goldfinch, and 8 were Greenfinch. This reflected the ratio of birds I've been getting recently. Goldfinches are really interesting. I still remember the first I ever caught in a garden at a previous house--in 1984!! In those days this was a rare catch in gardens but since then Goldfinches have become regular on garden feeders--probably due to the range of more suitable foods for them such as sunflower hearts and niger seed.

Greenfinches are a species that I have ringed many hundreds of over the years--but in the recent past their numbers plummeted due to a lung disease--so it is great to see their numbers building up again. They are still not as common as they used to be but the trend is in the right direction. When the Covid rules allow it I will be having trainees over to my house because these two species pose interesting challenges in terms of ageing and sexing.

The rest of the catch was not especially remarkable, except for this little beauty:-

This of course is a female Blackcap. As readers will know we ringed in excess of 1000 of these migrants during the summer--so what was this bird doing here now? Well I'm sure some of you will know that as our winters have generally warmed up, more and more Blackcaps are being recorded-especially in gardens. The range of foods helps here--especially high energy fat balls. Ringing has shown that these are NOT birds from the UK deciding to stay on over the winter. Rather they are Eastern European in origin ( and also, bizzarely, some birds from central France !!??). So it would be great news if someone in, say Poland, were to catch this bird next summer!! I wish......

Look out for more news as soon as I have the data.