All CES nets 540'
Weather: damp, misty, occasional showers
Ringers: LL, CK, CMS
We arrived at 4:30 and the nets went up reasonably quickly despite a shelf string breaking (again! - cheap nets are a poor investment...) It was a misty, drizzly morning with a lot of water drops coming off the trees over where we sit and we and the ringing kit got very wet. We had a large umbrella covering the place where we hang the birds but it was not necessary - we had so few birds we hardly had to hang them up.
Species
|
New Birds
|
Retraps
|
Total
|
Blackbird
|
2
|
2
|
|
Blackcap
|
4
|
4
|
|
Blue Tit
|
2
|
2
|
|
Long Tail Tit
|
5
|
5
|
|
Reed Warbler
|
7
|
7
|
|
18
|
2
|
20
|
We did get 7 new Reed Warblers with very little sign of breeding yet so these have probably only recently arrived. We wondered about the impact of the large areas of reed that were flattened by the heavy snow in December.
As you can see from the table, the range of species was very poor. No wrens!! Unheard of!! No Robins or Dunnocks. The Blackcaps were mainly females with BP3 and the first CES juveniles were the five Long Tail Tits.
The final total was just 20 birds compared to the average of 42. Our totals for the first three CES sessions add up to just 68 birds - the range since 1991 has been between 77 and 148 for these first three sessions: numbers are seriously down this year.
A young Muntjac stood watching us for a few minutes and Green Woodpecker, Cetti's Warbler and Willow Warbler were all singing.
After a morning of damp and drizzle the sun came out and a Mother Shipton moth appeared.
 |
| Mother Shipton on Ground Ivy |
No comments:
Post a Comment