Meisen Wood: Mid – May

Nets: 130m

Sound: None

Weather: cool to warm (persistent cold E wind)

Ringers:  CS and EB

May is a busy time ringing and we thoroughly enjoy the mix of normal mist netting sessions combining with Tawny Owl box visits, our passerine nest boxes to check and Kestrel boxes as well. This May has been particularly busy: the Tawny Owls have had an excellent breeding season, the best we have recorded; and our passerine boxes seem to have a good occupancy rate too.

The captures table below is from two ringing sessions – the totals in both sessions were slightly above average.

Species	Ringed	Re-trapped	Total
Blackcap	4	1	5
Blue Tit	1	5	6
Bullfinch	2		2
Chaffinch	4		4
Chiffchaff	1	1	2
Crested Tit	1		1
Dunnock		6	6
Firecrest		1	1
G S Woodpecker	1	7	8
Great Tit		11	11
Greenfinch	14		14
Marsh Tit	1	3	4
Mistle Thrush	2		2
Nuthatch		6	6
Pied Flycatcher	5	15	20
Robin	3	2	5
Song Thrush	2		2
Willow Warbler	1		1
Wren	1	2	3
Total	43	60	103

The Mistle Thrush is special bird for us because they are the first of the summer’s returning passerine migrants.  Their arrival at the end of February is our indicator that the seemingly interminable cold winter is really going to end!  When a Mistle Thrush sits at the top of a pine in the first few days of March and sings it’s fluting song with much gusto – noticeably thrush like, with long cadences in its chords - it cheers us up no end while doing garden chores.  Their habit of perching at the top of trees and singing, often in stormy weather, has earned them the colloquial name: stormcock, which according to folklore was supposed to forewarn of coming bad weather.  CS’s father used to consider that poppycock and thought the bird just had a personal sense of joie de vivre – a pleasant thought.  

Each spring we enjoy the Mistle Thrushes’ joie de vivre expression from high in the canopy and have considered it improbable that we would ever catch one of these heralds of spring; as they seem reluctant to descend from on high.  So having two Mistle Thrush simultaneously in a net was totally surprising.  Both were males, with substantial cloacal protuberances, and may have been disputing breeding territory boundaries when they blundered into the net.  Each year several do breed on-site and nearby, and earlier in the month we had observed a Mistle Thrush collecting moss and flying off in the direction where they were caught.

Pied Flycatchers continue to arrive.  The re-capture figures are mostly for first re-captures and include two birds that were ringed as nestlings in 2016 and 2018.  The re-capture from 2016 was particularly pleasing as it is the first re-capture this year of a bird that was not ringed in 2018; we are finding that statistic a tad disturbing. Though these are not phenomenal numbers they give some vindication to our efforts at encouraging their breeding by providing nest boxes – currently nine boxes are with birds on eggs; and several others have males singing in proximity to unoccupied boxes. 

Fourteen new Greenfinch is a surprisingly high number for May and we speculate that these are some of the many Greenfinch that were locally abundant during the winter and have remained to breed; certainly the females had the start of brood patches and several males are pronouncing their presence with their nasal song. 

As the Greenfinch are about to initiate their breeding efforts some birds have completed their first broods as evidenced with the year’s first fledglings being caught. The first fledgling captured was a Marsh Tit.  Simultaneously the three re-trap Marsh Tits had nearly completed their primary moult with moult scores of 42, and two of 46; ah, the seasons roll ever onwards.

Pleasingly this year the nest boxes in Meisen Wood have produced good number of tits; currently we have ringed 150 Great and Blue Tit nestlings with more to come as many are currently too small to ring.  And there are still the Kestrel boxes to visit and Swallows - though initial observations indicate their numbers are down – indeed hirundines in general were late arriving and in low numbers.  We look forward to collecting this valuable data through the rest of May and into early June particularly as some of the time will be spent with visiting ringers.