It’s always nice to get our nets up on an early spring morning. This is what we did at Blackburn Meadows N/R yesterday morning with hopes of catching some migrant warblers. With all nets up and mp3 players turned on, our target birds soon started to go into the nets. Before the sun and wind ended the session we had processed 28 birds, 16 being warblers. The best of the lot were 3 Lesser Whitethroats, 2 being retraps and both originally ringed in 2022 at Blackburn Meadows, to be retrapped again in 2023. The fact that both were caught only once each year makes me think that they’re using the reserve as a drop off point to feed up, or are they just avoiding the nets?

Kevin Bower

Our brand new annual report is now available to download here.

We may be biased but it’s a fantastic read!

Chris and I were back out on a South Yorkshire farm this week. Last winter the site held a flock of over 500 birds, mainly Linnets, Goldfinches and Reed Buntings.

The partridge/wild bird seed mix is still hosting good numbers of finches and buntings but the flock appears smaller this year. Although we didn’t catch many birds on this visit, the diversity of species was still great.

A Sparrowhawk paid its customary visit and watching the big open skies we witnessed the spectacle of four skeins of pink feet geese pass north west during the morning.

Eleanor

Sunday morning was our first cold ringing session of the winter for my team. We processed 52 birds mainly tits and thrushes. We also caught this adult female Water Rail in my Potter Trap. 

Kevin Bower

A flock of 60 or so finches was at Bondhay yesterday and these turned out to be largely Chaffinches, of which we caught 9, a high number for this site.

I hadn’t expected our catch to include 3 Bramblings amongst them, with a fourth bird escaping the net.

A Common/Mealy Redpoll amongst a flock of Lesser Redpolls topped the morning off.

Eleanor

Travelling to Skokholm Island, Pembrokeshire this summer for a ringing trip was a long drive and a choppy boat trip, but it was well worth it. Skokholm is Britain’s oldest bird observatory and was dubbed “Dream Island” by Ronald Lockley who settled on the island in 1927 and built the observatory. I read his book of the same name on a rainy day when we couldn’t do any ringing – it definitely set the scene and gave some context to what a special place Skokholm is.

The days were filled with sea-watching and pushing Heligoland traps, and the nights were filled with Manx Shearwater calls from every angle – the same spooky calls that once led sailors to believe that islands like Skokholm were haunted. Most of the ringing happened at night, which was a bit of an adjustment – I’d much rather wake up for ringing at 4 a.m. than I would stay up all night until 4 a.m.! 

Over the course of the trip, we ringed Wheatears, Rock Pipits, Puffins, Storm Petrels, Manx Shearwaters, and Lesser Black-backed Gulls, as well as some of the more usual suspects such as Chiffchaffs, Blackbirds, and Swallows. We used mist nets, potter traps and Heligoland traps during the day, a gull trap and some large spring traps to target gulls, and “furtled” for Puffins. At night we walked transects to ring Manx Shearwaters and mistnetted for Storm Petrels down by the sea.  

Extracting Storm Petrels in darkness by the water’s edge was atmospheric, to say the least. We were there during a week with very little moon, and you could only just see their silhouettes swooping over you like little bats. The noise of the speaker blasting Storm Petrel calls out to sea was immense, but at the same time, you could still hear the sound of the water lapping and the seals calling around you. An added treat was when a Puffin chick or a Manx Shearwater would come toddling down the path where the nets were – it would toddle off a few minutes later with a ring on its leg. 

On the nights when we weren’t ringing Storm Petrels, we did Manx Shearwater transects that started at the Observatory and went to the Lighthouse and back. The ground all over Skokholm is honeycombed with burrows made by Puffins, Manx Shearwaters and rabbits, meaning it’s important not to step off the paths – we were armed with landing nets to catch the Manx Shearwaters that were within reach. 

Another interesting highlight was “furtling” Puffin burrows to see if anyone was home so we could ring them! You never knew what you were going to find when you stuck your arm down a Puffin hole, the options were as follows:

• An empty burrow

• A “Puffling”

• An adult Puffin that latched on to your finger with the full force of its bill 

Despite risking life and (quite literally) limb, it was great to try a new method of ringing, and, as we know, ringing chicks is useful because you then know the exact age of the bird for the rest of its life. 

As a trainee, it was great to get more experience using bigger rings (E-rings for Manx Shearwater and Puffins, G-overlap rings for Lesser Black-backed Gulls) and A2 rings which I’d never used before (Rock Pipit, Storm Petrels). That part of Wales is absolutely beautiful, and island ringing is definitely an experience!

Bethany Newark

I felt it was about time to get a proper wader and cannon netting experience and joined SCAN’s weekend aiming to catch Ringed Plover in August. This was nearly cancelled due to high winds, but in the end just postponed a day. A small group of us met at Llanfairfechan and walked up to meet Steve, his partner Rachel, and their core team at the site on the beach. At low tide the beach is a huge expanse of sand/mudflats edged by a more steeply sloping shingle beach, behind which is a grassy bund falling away into low-lying marsh. This was going to be a dry catch, as the plovers were expected to come right up to the top of the beach and onto the shingle at high tide. 

Prior to the day, I hadn’t appreciated the technicalities of cannon netting (and the weight of the gear). Two nets were already roughly in position adjacent to each other, and we were allocated assisting roles to carry in the rest of the gear and help set things up. Everything was explained in detail: how the nets and cannons are set for a safe catch; adjustments to how far the nets would be fired based on their observations of the birds the previous day; positioning of the cannons so the net fires square; wiring; firing. Nets were furled to ensure a free flight secured to the ground at the back to the net, cannons and projectiles were set and dug in, wired, and circuits checked, after which we withdrew and waited.

It was probably a very mild introduction to the wader experience – it was very blustery, for sure, but it was dry, warm and sunny and a very pleasant few hours waiting for the tide to come in; and we were treated to a flock of about 1000 curlew roosting on the marsh. About an hour or so before high tide Steve and Rachel set up an observation post further along the beach to check on bird progress, twinkling the birds into a suitable position to secure the catch.  The estimate was about 70 birds and only one net would be fired.

As catch time approached the rest of the team were called to move into position out of sight in the lee of the bund. After firing speed was of the essence, and we were supposed to prevent the birds from escaping the net (possible on the large shingle) and leave most of the extraction to the more experienced. For speed and efficiency, it was however easier to extract the birds rather than try to prevent escape. I’m always amazed at how much smaller birds are close up than you think they are when you’re looking through binoculars. It was very exciting to find and extract the sanderlings in amongst the plovers. The birds were put into holding cages (15 plovers per cage; sanderlings and dunlins kept separate from the plovers) set up on the grass bank behind the beach. There were 6o+ ringed plovers, three dunlin and two sanderlings. Once the birds were in the holding cages, we were split into three groups – ringers (ringing and aging), colour flaggers (Rachel was colour flagging the plovers for a project she is running), and processers taking biometrics including to determine race. 

All in all, a great experience. A weekend of this in the winter is probably very hard work, particularly if there are big catches, but no doubt very fun and rewarding. I found the Incoloy rings tricky to close completely but I believe you can get adapted pliers to make this easier.

The following morning I was on the beach at Penmaenmawr having a swim alongside the oystercatchers, watching my clothes getting blown away in the wind! A great weekend!

Julia Banbury

An impromptu session on Friday morning for Meadow Pipits produced about 6 in the first net round. I’d just started processing them when I looked up and saw a raptor in the net. As I approached I could see it was a young Merlin which luckily for me did not manage to escape. Bingo! It’s been a long wait; always thought I’d get one someday. It was a young male ringed earlier this year by Roy Frost.

Steve Samworth

It’s been an interesting start to our summer months! Me and my friend Ian Unwin discovered a natural Sand Martin colony, amongst the river banks of the River Don. We were able to see good numbers of the breeding pairs foraging along the river and returning to their colony, possibly to feed young in the nest. After closely monitoring them, we entered the site with permission for a closer look. I was very intrigued to learn that the colony had been there for at least four years. With no one previously monitoring the site or ringing it, I jumped at the chance to ask permission from the land owner at Hooton Lodge, Kilnhurst! Charlotte Buck was very interested in us ringing her site and was fantastic, allowing Sorby Breck RG access to the private area of this site, which is thriving with nature.

On Sunday 25th June 2023 our team consisted of Harriet Day, Kevin Bower, Lydia Fretwell-Smith and Chris Corbin. Arriving at Hooton Lodge, a 4.00 a.m start was in order. We placed one mist net safely one metre in front of the Sand Martin colony, where 27 nesting holes were present. Having not set my expectations too high, I was delighted with the results. In total we extracted, measured and ringed 22 birds, except one. One was already ringed, which meant we had a ringing Control!

Between us we carefully read out the ring number, to discover that this adult male Sand Martin had been ringed previously by another ringing group! After patiently waiting for the recovery details from the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology), the results were amazing! It appeared that this male Sand Martin weighing 14.6 grams and with a wing length of 107mm, had travelled 77km from Donington on Bain, nr Louth, Lincolnshire, to breed at Hooton Lodge, Kilnhurst, Rotherham, South Yorkshire. A Lincolnshire bird ringer had ringed this little fellow in the nest in 2019, making it 4 years old!

This is a fascinating result for our first visit to the site, especially when data shows the average lifespan is thought to be two years old! Personally for me this sums up the purpose of what bird ringing is all about. The data collected during the ringing session reveals we caught and confidentially sexed at least ten males and five females with clear brood patches. It could be that we caught fewer females than males due to the females potentially incubating their eggs in the colony.

However we did happen to catch six juvenile Sand Martins that had hatched this year from the first brood in the colony at Kilnhurst. All the juveniles weighed between 12 and 13 grams; this was nearly equivalent to the adults’ weight, indicating a good source of food supply in the current area.

We would like to carry out a further ringing session in the early evening in September to compare our findings, before these birds migrate back to Africa to spend their winter …

Overall our efforts have rewarded us with positive data and our thanks go to everyone, especially to Charlotte at Hooton Lodge for allowing us to continue to ring at the site. It would be great to see the future outcome of these Riparias! (Sand Martins).

Harriet Day