31/03/17 Happy Birthday Nan!

It's my Nan's birthday! So Grandad if you're reading this please tell Nan a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY Love from me 💙💚💛💜💝

I'd just got my nets up and it tried to rain... luckily only for a few minutes and then it was dry for the rest of the morning :) I tried my little 6 metre net in amongst some low trees and I had to cut a few branches back to save my net some injuries! It caught quite a bit! The Wren, Treecreeper and Long Tailed Tit all came from that net - half of this mornings captures.. It also caught the Dunnock I'd already caught and ringed earlier in the morning. Will definitely try that net again, if the nettles don't get too high later on in the year..!

Apart from the Robin because I hadn't thought to do it until after I'd caught and released it, I noted down the sexes I thought the birds might be, even though it's a bit early in the season. These were just for my records and I didn't submit them to IPMR, but since I get a lot of retraps at the Butterfly Reserve, it will be interesting if I capture them later on in the breeding season to see if the sexes that I noted down were correct.

Simon came over at about 10am to bring me breakfast (thank you!!!💗) just as I was ringing the Long Tailed Tit. A man saw me release the bird and came over, asking "was I just seeing things or did you just let that bird go?!" hehe. I explained what I was doing and he had a positive reaction so that's good :)

When we took the nets down, there was a bee stuck in my net :( unfortunately for Simon, I didn't want to do what had to be done so he did, and it stung him! :O bringing me breakfast and taking one for the team 😌 double thank you!!! 💗💗

IPMR gave me a weird warning about not having a printer installed so it didn't give me the normal totals list... but here's a screenshot when I ran today's date in a query

And here's a photo of the pollen chops Blue Tit we caught today! 💗😍

27/03/17 Woodp

It was a stressful morning net-wise. I was going to do what I did last time and attach two nets together around the Oak Tree with the feeder, the first net went up fine, but when I was taking the second net out of the bag, I noticed that the top string was sagging loads, so I took it back in. I was trying to get the net in the bag when a peg that was in my pocket got really badly tangled in the first net. Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh. I then tried putting up another net at the border of the open area, where I'd seen some Blue Tits fly in previous sessions. This net fell over on top of me while I was putting it up, thankfully not getting tangled in brambles. I also had to re-arrange the guy ropes while it was on the ground. ugh. I sat down for 5 minutes to breathe and then went and put a little 6 metre net up in a more sheltered area. For the rest of the session I wished that that net was longer because there was so much activity in that area and the mini net caught one Robin all morning.

I caught a new male Great Tit and a retrap Dunnock in the first net next to the Oak Tree. The second net I put up I held a grudge against all morning because if it was positioned maybe a few metres differently it would have caught quite a bit, I reckon :P and it caught nothing else all morning until I was thinking about packing up when a Wood Pigeon flew in. I'd had a pretty bad morning so I ran towards it and managed to get to it before it got itself out :D some good experience putting a bigger (F size) ring on and the first time I've used my big ringing pliers and cheered me up a bit :). Wood Pigeons do a weird moult, according to the French book. It says that there is suspended moult in young birds, so I thought it might be an age code 5 (born last year), but the book also says that some individuals suspend the moult for a second year, so it might have been an age code 7 (born the year before last year)... so I put it down as an age code 4 (not born this year, but unsure which exact year) just in case.

The picture below is of the Wood Pigeon's suspended moult in it's secondary feathers. Look at the tips of the feathers - some are worn and tatty, while some are neater and newer.

25/March/17 Cetti's!

The Butterfly Reserve was alive with bird song when I arrived at 6:15. I put two nets up at first, then went back to the car and cut some more guy ropes from the Paracord that Simon gave me and put up a third net. The Paracord slipped a bit when I put the third net up so I kept checking it over the course of the morning and they seemed to hold up fine after that :)

First two rounds I had one Wren each time. The second Wren was spun and was a pain to extract. After processing it it was a bit stressed-looking so I let it warm up and calm down inside my jumper. It seemed okay after a few minutes and flew off. 

The next round I had a Dunnock that had been caught very close to the end of the net and it looked very tangled. I thought "Oh no not another difficult extraction" but actually it turned out to be easy. In this round I also caught the only new bird of the session - a Long-Tailed Tit (!) I thought I'd probably ringed the entire population of Long-Tailed Tits in the Butterfly Reserve by now! But obviously not :P

The next round I caught a Cetti's Warbler!! Ever since I started ringing at this site I'd always heard a Cetti's in the reedbed behind the Reserve, but not caught one until today! After reading up in the French ID book I aged it as a 5, because there was a slight difference in colour tones on the wing, like the book said, but when I tried submitting it to IPMR it refused to let me age it as anything but a 4, so 4 it is. (I may have been wrong and the colour might not have been significant enough to age it, I will have to get my eye in when the NRG start catching them at the CES reedbed this year :) ) I also caught another Wren in this round. Each Wren I processed today were retraps, all from different ring series.

The last bird caught this morning was a Dunnock (almost typed Duck - I wish lol) at 9:45. When checking the nets a little while after this catch a Wood Pigeon gave me a heart attack by flying into my net, taking it down to the ground and then escaping... thanks :P and then a little while later than that I was checking the nets to find a big grey thing in that same net! "Gotcha," I thought, thinking it might be the same Wood Pigeon from earlier, but on closer inspection it was a Sparrowhawk! I started to pick up the pace but unfortunately it saw me, thrashed about a bit and got free before I could get to it :( next time!

21/3/17 Green Woodpecker bounce!

My second attempt at putting nets up at Bowdown was more successful. I used the mallet to bash in the pegs and that worked well, but because I only have 6 "heavy duty" pegs, I only put 2 nets up (attached to each other). It was forecast to get windy later on in the morning, and I had to pack up at 10:30 because my poles were threatening to blow over..!

A nice. sunny morning, the birds were so noisy all around me! Including 2 Green Woodpeckers, one of which bounced out of the net :-( I heard them cackling all around me for about an hour before they moved on. Fingers crossed one gets properly caught next time! It was such a nice sunny morning, just hearing and seeing the birds all around me, and watching their movements around the nets. When I get paid I'll definitely be buying some more sturdy pegs and some more poles to try out a load of different net positions :-)

I caught a Robin - blowing the feathers off of the belly I'm sure it was a female because the belly was swollen as if she was egg bound, but I didn't submit the sex to IPMR just in case I was wrong. I'll talk to the rest of the NRG about how reliable the swollen belly is as a sexing method. I caught a Coal Tit and a retrap Marsh Tit from the last ringing session at Bowdown.

140317 the first Chiffchaff!

I ringed the Butterfly Reserve this morning - it's sooo nice that the Nature Discovery Centre is only a couple of roads away from our new flat! Takes about 2 minutes to get there - amazing!

Yesterday and today I've heard loads of Chiffchaff's! At work last night I was midway through talking to someone outside the building when I heard a Chiffchaff really close by and all attention to the conversation was lost 😋 they must've thought I was crazy... 😌 it was no different at the Butterfly Reserve this morning - Chiffchaff were noisier than anything else! I put a mixed tape on of Chiffchaff, Goldcrest and Firecrest (still hopeful), and as it's nearly the breeding season I'll not use tapes again, but it did get me a Chiffchaff in the net this morning! First one of the year for Newbury Ringing Group 😃 I even remembered the wing formula without having to think about it - impressive!

For the people reading this who don't know what the wing formula is, it's a method used to tell apart similar species, in this case Chiffchaff and Willow Warbler. You have to look at the primary feathers for the emargination (I don't know how to describe it... like indents on the outer side of the primary), the wing point (longest primary) and look at the length of the second primary compared to the rest of the primaries, and note down which is the same length, or note the two down that the second is between (hope this makes sense).

After the Chiffchaff I caught a Long-tailed Tit. I've seen posts on Bird Ringing groups on Facebook saying that some people are starting to see signs of breeding activity on some birds, so I checked the Long-tailed Tit but couldn't see any signs. Eeeee babies sooooon 💓

13/03/17 Bowdown

Yet another new site ringed at today! Bowdown Woods! I met up with Ian from BBOWT and Bowdown's warden, Roger on Friday to discuss where would be best to ring and it was agreed that the enclosed area would be the best area - it's more open so more places for nets to be put up, there are feeders hanging in an Oak tree and, best of all, since there's a fence the whole way around the perimeter there'll be less risk of dog walkers making contact with nets!

I got on site at about 6am, filled the seed feeder with Sunflower Seeds and got to work on putting nets up. I found that putting the pegs into the ground was REALLY hard - under the first layer of soil it's just solid rock! I managed to get one net up, Ian's 12 metre one, and tried and struggled to put another one up. I tried two different places and then I gave up. I texted Simon to tell him about my struggles and he reminded me that I had a mallet in my car. By that point, though, after struggling for ages only to feel stupid that I didn't think of the mallet, I decided to just keep it to one net 😋

There were two more obvious places where putting a net up would be beneficial, all around the Oak tree with the feeder on it, but the one net did not disappoint! 3 Nuthatches and 3 Marsh Tits (don't see those everyday!) and 16 birds in total. I heard Chiffchaff calling all morning, and we heard Redpoll (a rattly sounding call).

Jan came to join me and we had a look at my weighing scale, which has a mind of it's own. After trying to calibrate it, it just got worse, so Jan has kindly lent me one of his weighing scales while he takes mine home with him to look at a bit more.

Totals for the morning: 

< Nuthatch!

> The median coverts (or shoulder feathers as I professionally call them) on the Nuthatch here show contrasts, with some blue and some grey. This suggests it was born last year.

 

The colour of the undertail feathers on these two nuthatches tell us what sex these individuals are.

< The pale colouring on the Nuthatch on the left suggests that this is a female.

> The darker ginger colour on the Nuthatch on the right suggests that this is a male.

And below, a beautiful Marsh Tit on the left, and on the right an angry retrap male Great Spotted Woodpecker, which was ringed by Jan as an age code 5 in 2014 and, until today, had not been retrapped since.

6th and 7th March

Hiiiii!

We're all moved in to our new flat and we have wifi! So I can finally post blogs about recent ringings 😁

So on the 6th, I did a test run of a new site in a car park (I'm sworn to secrecy about which car park, but those of you who know me will know! Ooh this also means I can't post any of my photo's from that morning, in case you guys can guess where I am..!) where I'm hoping to catch more Pied and White Wagtails than anything else... I got there really early, about an hour before sunrise, because when I usually get to this car park it's still dark and the Wagtails are usually already about (I saw 2 Wagtails on this particular morning - typical). I set one net because I didn't want to be inundated with birds, especially when it's probably more likely here than at any other of the places I've ringed that I'll encounter people, even though they did close the top floor of the car park for me (thank you!). Long story short, I could have put more nets up because I caught a grand total of 0 birds, lol. There was a Robin, Blackbird and a feral pigeon "stuck" (I put it in inverted commas because I'm sure they go in there on purpose... especially the pigeons) inside the building where the lifts and stairs are, so I put a net up in there, too. Nope, didn't catch them either. In fact, the Blackbird tried to perch on the top string of my net. Like Jan told me, it will probably be a better site to ring in the Autumn. The best/funniest sighting that morning was Crows throwing all the rubbish out of the bins! 😆

Next up was the Butterfly Reserve on Tuesday 7th March! Is it bad that I don't really remember any highlights from that morning? I didn't even take any photos! I'm sorry! Here's my totals for that session, though:

03/March/2017 Bricks?

I'm ringing in a car park on Monday and I'm having trouble thinking of things that I can use to suspend my net strings from, because obviously I wouldn't be able to put a tent peg into the ground like I usually do at the Butterfly Reserve and every other site I've ever ringed at...

I thought I'd have a go at using bricks and did a test run in Ailsa's garden (thank you Ailsa!) ...I'm sad to say that the bricks are kinda rubbish - just one brick isn't heavy enough and dragged along the ground when I tightened the string, and when I used two bricks the top one fell off the bottom one when I tightened the string, but it did work somewhat and held up for the two hours that I left the net up for, but ideally I'd like something that I can rely on a bit more! I had thought of buying breeze blocks or something and I think I'm going to have to unless I get any other bright ideas... 💡😕 any ideas are very welcome!!

In the two hours that I was ringing I caught two Blue Tits. Ailsa has two seed feeders, a fat ball feeder and a table feeder that has meal worms on it. I could have caught a lot more if I'd set the net in a different position - there were House Sparrows and Goldfinches in the trees, two Starlings came to the fat ball feeder, there were Blue Tit's on the seed feeder and a Robin going for the meal worms. A female Blackbird showed interest in the meal worms too but she didn't stay for long.