Back in Action

 Apologies for the lack of posts recently but I've been away on a couple of holidays and playing catch-up ever since. Things are getting back to normal and November has got off to a belting start.

I posted a while ago that Redwings had started to reach us from breeding sites far to the north and east--and for a few days we managed to catch good numbers. Then it almost stopped----puzzling. As a guide, during the recent past few years, Pete would catch between 30 and 50 Redwing every morning. This year it's been 10-20! Until these last few days when it has been obvious that a second major wave of these--and the first Fieldfares, has arrived; and as a result the catch rate as increased considerably. We have ringed over 200 in the first few days of November. One of the issues we have when ringing Redwings is that they attract predators-mainly in the form of Sparrowhawks. I have previously shown pictures of very young Sparrowhawks with pale yellow eyes and arrowhead shaped brown splodges ( technical term!!??) on their breast and belly. But here are a couple of pictures of an almost adult male with orange eyes, orange breast and bars rather than splodges:-

We've also started our thermal imaging activities during the day for Jack Snipe, and at night mainly for Skylarks, Grey Partridge and Woodcock ( the latter of which have just arrived).

One very interesting aspect came out during our session a couple of days ago. For starters we ringed 7 new Patridges which is a really high number--but most intriguing were 3 birds which appeared to have only just left the nest. Here is the head of one showing the dappled crown pattern with the buffy cream coloured cheeks only just starting to appear:-

Lots of other activities going on--more later.......