Back home

With 100% humidity, clearing skies and waterlogged grass underfoot, it was with some trepidation I set out this morning with the intention of ringing. With it being so wet last night (>20mm rain), I swapped sub-sites and went back to the old faithful, "the rough", where I knew I could avoid the worst of the wet.

It took a while to get the nets up as the net loops on these latest ones are smaller and stick easily on wet bamboo. Once up, I erected the net by the feeders, now that the birds had had their dawn feed, the most important for many of them.

Early birds were three more Blackcaps, this time with two males, reversing the recent sex pattern. Plenty of Blue Tits in between and a few more retraps of pulli from our scattered boxes. Finally a burst of Chaffinches, well, just three actually, all birds of the year and one a female.

Scoreboard after roughly two hours:
Blue Tit 4 (10)
Great Tit (1)
Blackcap 3
Wren 1
Robin (2)
Dunnock 1
Chaffinch 3

 One of today's male Chaffinches

A 'long dead' bird was found on a fence post; the B ring was recovered and turned out to be from a House Sparrow that we ringed hereabouts in August 2008 as a juvenile.

Sightings this morning included a Jay, a male and a female Sparrowhawk, two high flying Song Thrushes, a Marsh Tit on the feeder, a Reed Warbler at the top of a tall Ash tree, a passing Goldcrest and a Chiff that refused to be coerced into any net by a tape lure!