Marsworth CES 1

All CES nets 560'
Weather: Very warm, clear skies, light breeze.
Ringers: LL, CMS, CK
Nets open 5:00 - 11:00am

Species	New Birds	Retraps	Total
Blackbird		1	1
Blackcap	1	2	3
Blue Tit	1		1
Chaffinch		1	1
Chiffchaff	1		1
Jay	1		1
Reed Bunting		1	1
Reed Warbler	6	1	7
Sedge Warbler	1	1	2
Song Thrush		2	2
Wren		4	4
	11	13	24

The start of the CES season began with a beautiful sunrise and a reed bed symphony of bird song: reed warblers, reed buntings, willow warbler were the main players with occasional bursts of cuckoo, cetti's warbler and blackcap.
Our first round was quite busy with four new Reed Warblers and a male Song Thrush originally ringed in June 2015. Later on in the morning we trapped a female in the same area that had been ringed as a juvenile in Sept 2013. By the second round it had already started to go quiet, neither of the two singing Willow Warblers went in the net and neither did the Cetti. We retrapped an adult male Chaffinch that had been originally caught in Feb 2016, his central tail feathers had the black patch at the tip characteristic of adults even though the tertials lacked the rufous colouring on the fringe you would expect to see on an adult male. Bird of the day though was a female Jay caught in net 3 later in the morning.

Chaffinch

Black patches on central tail feathers of Chaffinch

Tertials with unusually yellow fringes

 With time on our hands we checked all the tit boxes and from 9 boxes we found only 4 occupied, two by Great Tits and two by Blue Tits, including this clutch of 9 blue tit eggs in a box made by Chris's son.

The final total of 24 was better than last year (21) but well below the average of 38 for session 1.

Lynne