Putting up nets was sooo much easier with pegs (and a helper - thanks Simon 😁). The guy ropes didn't seem too short at all today! We put up three nets - my 6 metre North Ronaldsay net, 9 metre Ecotone net and Ian has lent me Gundry nets (thank you Ian 😄), so I used one of those too. I was intrigued to see what the hype was about - apparently Gundry nets are gold dust because birds are so easy to extract from them but they've been discontinued (Jan told us that they were discontinued because the manufacturers put the price up to £3. Apparently that was too expensive!! Crazy how times change!).
The Gundry net was set on the straight length of footpath just ahead as you walk through the gate, the other two were set just around the corner, the Ecotone net over a boggy bit, so we set the bottom net shelf quite high. We finished setting up and walked back the rest of the circular footpath to the gate. Just as we were saying we'd go have a quick coffee and some breakfast we saw the Gundry net full of Long Tailed Tit's... no breakfast for us! And yes, we can confirm that these nets are very easy to extract birds from! We caught birds in all three nets that round and in total we had 8 Long Tailed Tits, 3 Wrens, a Blue Tit and a Blackbird. I must admit I panicked a bit - it was a bit of a contrast to last time's catch..!
We did end up getting our breakfast, though, because after that round it slowed down. We caught 3 Dunnocks - all in separate net rounds and all in different nets. We watched the birds on the lake and uploaded our sightings into BirdTrack, then Jan came to see us. While we were chatting a Robin was sitting on the gate teasing us. While we took my two nets down I wondered if we would catch it in the last net. We didn't, but we did catch one last Wren. 😊
Below is a table showing which species we ringed, whether they were new birds or retraps and the age codes of each individual:
| RTYPE | SPEC | AGE |
| N | LOTTI | 2 |
| N | LOTTI | 2 |
| N | LOTTI | 2 |
| N | LOTTI | 2 |
| N | LOTTI | 2 |
| R | LOTTI | 2 |
| R | LOTTI | 2 |
| N | WREN | 3 |
| N | LOTTI | 2 |
| N | BLUTI | 3 |
| R | WREN | 3 |
| N | WREN | 3 |
| R | BLABI | 4 |
| N | DUNNO | 4 |
| N | DUNNO | 3 |
| R | DUNNO | 4 |
| N | WREN | 3 |
We caught 2 adult and a juvenile Dunnock. Dunnock's are sometimes hard to age, because they vary so much between individuals and methods of ageing sometimes aren't 100% reliable. Luckily the Dunnock's we caught today were clear examples. A juvenile, as shown below, has chocolate or muddy-brown coloured eyes, and the pale "splodges" on the greater coverts are large, bold and cream coloured:
Adults, on the other hand, have a red-brown coloured eye and the splodges are much smaller and duller:
Look at the alignment of the bars on this Wren's wing! OCD = satisfied.
And Simon likes to take action shots 😛
No comments:
Post a Comment