08/April/17 yay company!

I had Simon come out with me for the whole morning for the first time in ages! It was good to have some help setting up nets and chats and things so I think he should come ringing with me more often (hint 😁) 

We put up four nets this morning. Our plan was to put three nets up and then fix and leave up the fourth net because I thought the top string had come loose but when we put it up this morning it was fine. All four nets were up by 7, and we started taking the nets down at 11:15. I have a good idea about where I want to put nets up next time because we noticed a lot of activity in a couple of areas, including a pair of Blackcap near to the gate.

We retrapped the Cetti's warbler that I had caught last time. Jan had sent me previous records of this particular bird and Simon ringed it. Simon had also processed it two times between ringing it and me retrapping it last week, and then Simon processed it again today! All of the data!

We had 5 Wrens this morning, including 2 new and 2 age 6 with rings close together in the ring series (HTP234 and HTP236). The female Great Spotted Woodpecker was born last year and had a brood patch (BP2). I need to work out how to submit brood patch and cloacal protrusion onto IPMR - I'll ask the group when I go ringing with them tomorrow morning.

Last but not least at 11:10 was another Wood Pigeon! Earlier in the morning Simon said that he wanted to ring one, and his wish was granted! And like last time I dropped everything I was holding and RAN to the net to stop it getting out (I don't run. Ever. 😜). Fingers crossed that the excitement of this catch makes Simon want to come out ringing with me again and again! 😗

Here are the totals for the morning:

4/April/17 Thorpe Park

I'm exhausted! Went ringing this morning and then went to Thorpe Park straight after. Got home about an hour ago and I'm nearly ready for bed (gotta have dinner first though - taco's yay!)

I left the flat while it was still dark to make the most of the time and daylight that I had because I knew I'd have to leave earlier than I usually would. I bought 8 more pegs yesterday so that I had plenty for this morning, but I placed one of the nets on a footpath, which was impenetrable with the pegs, so I carefully tied the guy ropes to Blackthorn trees..! They'll come in handy I'm sure but I needn't have bought the pegs after all :P

I caught a good variety of birds this morning, and I had a Great Spotted Woodpecker narrowly avoid the net, too. Highlights from the morning include:

• The Dunnock that I caught had a very advanced brood patch.
• The retrap Great Tit with ring number D738706 isn't a ring series I recognise. I wonder if it's one of Jan's rings?
• Having caught a Coal Tit and a Marsh Tit in the same round it was good to see side by side how different they really are from each other!
• I wasn't expecting my footpath net to catch very much and I was pleasantly surprised when it caught two Chiffchaffs! :D (it caught the Blackbird, too).
• The Blue Tit that I caught as I was taking the nets in was a beautiful big bright blue boy! (all the B's!) He was lovely :)

Totals for the morning:

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 💓