A better day was had by all

The penicillin capsules are starting to have an effect. The cough is drying up and so is the mucus.
The weather has been "quiet", some would say, grey skies, light winds but low temps. This is ideal in some ways for catching birds.

Today, they took another catch at the Blunham trap and caught a lot of new Gadwall. Later in the day, I went over to Chris Z's and loaded IPMR on his computer and set it all up. We then put in the last two catches.

In the garden, it was painfully slow. A new female Great Tit, a species not seen for the best part of three months, a 5F Blackbird that sneaks in down the side passage but doesn't go beyond the Apple tree (i.e. as far as a net) and a 5M Goldfinch. However, a fresh party of Lottis, numbering six, appeared at the top of the garden, on their way to next door's feeders in a small but thickly branched Field Maple. Nine new birds for the day.

A call from the park to say that Danny had picked up a male Pochard with a ring on. It was a Blunham bird (can't tell you when it was ringed because we're only just inputting the records, backwards historically). It was a big bird (wing of 222) but was drastically underweight (at 690 gms) after the recent bad weather of prolonged ice-over and snow cover. While in the park, I made the bi-daily Bird Aid drop off in the Rough.

Yesterday, Lee Evans (UK400Club) read somecolour rings of the Barnacle Geese at Willington. These turned out to be birds that are faithful to this area and have not been seen "wandering around the countryside". LGRE manged to read 20 out of 33 he noticed. At the end of last October, another bird-watcher managed to read 13 c-r, none of which Lee recorded this week.Just two of these had been involved in a "local wander".