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!
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