Busy Bank……..Holiday!?!

The bank holiday weekend started with a nice voicemail on my phone from my friend, Andrew. He was ringing to tell me that he could hear 'hissing' coming from one of my Barn owl boxes that I've had on his farm now for around 8 years. Andrew was asking whether it would be possible to call in to check on this. So armed with a schedule 1 licence - we ventured up to the farm to see whether our box had gained lodgers after all these years!

This become quite clear as we approached the box to 4 small but rather loud mouthed 'hissy' chicks! And the feisty female who remained inside the box. Two of the chicks were big enough to hold rings, with the other two being ready in the next 2-3 weeks. We also managed to lift the female out of the box for ringing too.

Saturday we spent the full day at WWT Martin Mere for the 2nd instalment of Tree sparrow monitoring. Out of 109 boxes, 70 were occupied by Tree sparrows at various stages – most containing eggs/chicks – with others containing lined nests which are ready to be laid in. 30 chicks ringed during the day, with lots more ready for ringing next week.

We also monitor other species at WWT Martin Mere both for ringing & Nest Recording. These including Barn owl, Kestrel, Lapwing, Avocet & Stock Dove.

Female Stock Dove lifted off the nest whilst brooding small chicks.

& several Lapwing broods gave us the run around with 10 chicks ringed over the weekend & several nests found (below).

The rest of the weekend has been spent nest recording, we’re having somewhat quite a record year – with almost 400 nest records on the go at the moment. Nesting highlights this weekend include finding Bullfinch, Whitethroat, Green Woodpecker and Starling nests (the latter two being monitored by placing our mobile phones in the nest holes to record/photograph the contents!)

All in all a very busy, fun & rewarding weekend! The highlight definitely being - finding out that our Barn owl box is now being used, in a new location for them in Greater Manchester in the NW of the county. Today the weather isn’t too great – so this will allow us time to catch up on IPMR work!

Colourful Nesters.

Yesterday Zac, Gillian & myself decided to take advantage of the break in the recent bad weather & head to Atherton Woods for a nest box check. We tried to do this last week, but the weather stopped us. This visit was mainly to see what stage the Tits were at in the breeding season & to ring a brood of Tawny Owls that we found in a natural hole.
Me & Gillian checked 60 boxes of which 47 were occupied. 31 by Blue Tits, 14 by Great Tit & 2 holding Nuthatch nests.

Zac is carrying out his university dissertation project in the woods this year, looking at whether Blue Tits overlap in territory whilst collecting nesting materials. So we left Zac to monitor his ten boxes. I won't go into great detail on this (I'll leave this for Zac) but he's using different colours of wool to help him answer this. So as you'll see from the below photos lots of the boxes we opened were rather colourful!

 

The brood of Tawny Owl were duly ringed before leaving the woods.

After dropping Zac off at the train station to head back to Bangor, I went to visit my parents at Pickmere in Cheshire. Again making the most of the better weather, a spot of Nest Recording was on the cards. A rather successful search gave us 8 Blackbird, 2 Dunnock, 1 Song Thrush, 1 Greenfinch & 1 Blackcap nest to monitor for the scheme.
However find of the day has to go to Gillian for finding this nest -

Taaddaaa……. Clutch of 6 Robin eggs….

I Love Working For WWT!

It’s now over 6 months ago since I started my new position at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust HQ, Slimbridge (feels longer, for all the right reasons!) and I can honestly say that I’ve loved every single minute of it! I count myself very lucky in that I rock up for work every morning and I don’t get that ‘urgh I have to work’ feeling, plus that I get to work alongside some awesome colleagues in the Species Conservation Department & the Trust as a whole.

No two days are ever alike! And today was just like that as our Head of Species Conservation – Baz Hughes - came to my office door with a nice surprise in the form of a Great-crested Grebe that needed ringing! This bird being captured by our Reserve Warden – James Lees.

Photo by Paul Rose.

James Lees

Only around 411 Great-crested Grebes have been ringed in the UK since the start of the ringing scheme (BTO Online) – I feel privileged in getting the opportunity to handle & ring this very elegant and very understudied species.

Thanks to Baz for coming to get me & to James for capturing the bird!

All in a days work…….

Not Enough Hours in the Day!

Sorry for the lack of postings over the last couple of weeks, I have been very busy & although I’ve been doing lots of ringing – I’m afraid I haven’t found the time to update my blog! This mainly due to several things including work, family & travelling.

Things are starting to kick off on the pullus front now & we (Chris, Gillian & I) have got well over 200 Nest Record Cards on the go now. We’ve already ringed our first pulli of the year in the form of broods of Robin, Blackbird, Stock Dove and Collared Dove – with many more to follow over the coming weeks.

Several trips to & from Scotland has allowed us to catch several Black-headed Gulls at Killington Reservoir (a nice way to break up a road journey!) and over the past few weeks we’ve caught & darvic ringed 20 gulls. This also providing a great opportunity to re-sight BHGs already carrying our colour rings within the vicinity of Killington. This would make a great RAS project on the species, seeing that we get many re-sightings from people passing by the service station – if only we had more time on our hands!?

Chris & I have recently returned back from Norway where we spent my Birthday weekend in & around Oslo City. There we met up with Carsten & John Martin who kindly gave us a guided tour of Oslo, plus their ringing sites, as well as catching several birds in the famous Frognerparken! Both myself & Chris enjoyed ourselves and it was finally great to meet both Carsten & John Martin. Many thanks!!

We were hoping to see 2A00 whilst in Oslo, this being a BHG that we colour marked at Lake Windermere back in 2011. Although 2A00 arrived in Oslo a few days before we arrived! Sadly this bird was found with an injured wing and was put to sleep by local vets, several days before our visit!

So that’s it for now! Always hoping that we could bring in a 36 hour day or someone creates a pill that allows you to work on 3 hours sleep! But I guess I should carry on dreaming………….!

Thanks!

This is probably the easiest way to get this message out!

Thanks to all those ringers who dug deep into their pockets at the NW Ringers' Conference to buy raffle tickets! & to the North Lancs ringing group for choosing the NW Coot project to donate the proceeds to – it is very much appreciated and this generous donation will be a huge help in buying darvics for the future ringing of Coot!

Special thanks to Richard du Feu & Alan Draper in particular…

Kane & Steve.

Meeting ‘Mr Black-headed Gull!’

So from Croatia we flew to Holland after being invited by Frank Majoor to stay with him in Arnhem. Frank is probably best known for his work on Black-headed Gulls and for his dedicated work on monitoring the survival of species through RAS projects.

We arrived in Hilversum after a pleasant flight to Schiphol & no sooner had we met Frank he got us to work as we helped him to read hundreds of rings (both metal & cr-rings)! A very large percentage of gulls in the flocks we saw carried rings (now knowing why they call Frank ‘Mr Black-headed Gull’!), reading rings kept us very busy for hours on end! Quoting Ciaran ‘‘I’ll go to bed tonight with the sound of BHG ringing in my ears & numbers flying all over my head!’’

and if you want a Black-headed Gull’s eye view of two ring readers….

But of course we also visited Frank to learn of his trapping methods. Frank & Jeroen catch gulls mainly by using nooses which allows them to ‘select’ birds that are of particular interest to them. For example any metal ring only birds that we sighted, where the metal ring came from a different country – then this bird would be ‘targeted’ to add a colour ring to the bird. We were rather impressed to have the birds in our hands within minutes of Frank sighting the birds! During our last day Frank had captured 4 Swedish metal rings only – therefore adding a colour ring to the bird for easier identification within the field.

A Finnish ringed gull, now complete with colour ring!

During our last day in Holland we set off rather early to the North to see both American Herring Gull & a Glaucous Gull (Nice to catch up with my friend Otto de Vries here!) before travelling to Amsterdam for the day. The plan for the day was to tour around several parks in Amsterdam to ring read & to carry out some catching. So keeping in with true Dutch fashion with hired bicycles for the day! Pleased to report that we both left the Netherlands unscathed, but we did have one or two close encounters with nearly crashing into the locals!

Throughout the day we caught 53 new Coot, several Black-headed & Common Gull, Moorhen & a Grey Heron!!

Good to see & colour ring a few Coot!

 

Ciaran with the Grey Heron (most impressed with this capture we were!) note him keeping the birds head well held, for obvious reasons!

A number of Common Gull also colour-ringed.

& colour ringed Egyptian geese as part of one of Frank’s many RAS projects!

A white Black-headed Gull – colour ringed of course!!

& perhaps ‘bird of the day’ goes to this Caspian Gull! Which is now sporting a colour ring!

Frank & Ciaran reading rings on the ice! Ice is very useful!!

Both Ciaran & I left the Netherlands learning so much from Frank & Jeroen. We’d like to thank them both for having us along, we enjoyed our stay very much – being in the company of Frank & receiving first class hospitality by ‘Mr Black-headed Gull’!

THANK-YOU!

IGM Croatia.

Last week Ciaran & I travelled from Manchester to Croatia, to attend the 11th International Gull Meeting being held in Zagreb. The meeting included lots of fine talks on a wide range of topics from identifying gulls, aging and a number of talks gave the results of certain ringing projects both on large & small gulls. The meeting also held a field trip to Zagreb’s fine & smelly rubbish dump (where better to look for gulls!?), treated to an amazing traditional Croatian meal & finally a cannon netting session on the rubbish dump!

A few photos -

Luka Jurinovic

Yellow legged Gull.

Viola Ross Smith holding Yellow legged Gull…

Caspian Gull (cachinnans)

During the cannon netting session we captured a number of Yellow legged gulls, Caspian, Black-headed and Common Gull. The team went on for another catch – catching lots more including the first Lesser Blacked Backed Gull to be caught & ringed in Croatia! More can be read on Luka’s blog.

Many thanks to Luka & Vedran for organising and hosting a fantastic meeting! We really enjoyed our time in Croatia & meeting so many people! We’ll certainly be back in Croatia in the future!

When a Lithuanian ringed gull, becomes a British ringed gull!

The week just gone has been a rather busy one with over 200 birds captured, consisting of 160 new & the rest being recaptures and controls. With the cold weather still hanging around, and most ponds & lakes still frozen over - the bulk of the weekends ringing mainly focussed on catching Coot & Black-headed Gulls. Most of our time was spent at Southport Marine Lake catching both species & by the end of the weekend we had successfully bagged 48 new Coot & 17 Black-headed Gulls.

There were some rather interesting captures of the latter species, in that Ciaran managed to catch a Norwegian ringed bird (below) that was already sporting a darvic ring (more on this later!) but also a Lithuanian metal ringed bird was also caught! This being the first foreign ringed bird now sporting one of our colourful darvic rings!

However on closer inspection of the metal ring of this bird, it become obvious that we needed to replace this as we could just about read LITHUANIA and the code was almost unreadable! Which left us wondering whether this could be a rather old bird – watch this space!

As always when out catching at our Coot sites, we always make time to look for colour ringed birds – this proving most useful for ‘logging’ birds back at their wintering/ringing locations. Although I have yet to enter this information onto the computer, just looking at a few histories clearly shows birds summering away from Southport, moving all over the UK & then travelling back to Southport to spend the winter! I’ve said this many times before, but these birds really do amaze me – in that you very rarely see them in flight or move off a pond – yet ringing them is unravelling lots of information on their secret nocturnal movements!  

Anyhow back to the Norwegian darvic’d Black-headed Gull.  This bird was caught and ringed by Carsten Lome & Morten Helberg in April 2008 in Frognerparken, Oslo.  Carsten & Morten also controlled one of our Black-headed Gulls (famous 2A00!) in Oslo in March last year. So we’ve now ‘exchanged’ birds with each other’s projects!

Several mist netting sessions this week caught decent numbers of Greenfinch, Goldfinch & Blackcap. A Common Gull caught in Manchester was also a highlight!

Decoy, Ducks & Demos!

Instead of doing the usual and heading back to Manchester this weekend, I spent my first full weekend down in Gloucestershire! Several events were on the agenda this weekend, but sadly - due to the weather, not all went to plan!

Saturday kicked off with WWT Slimbridge's Festival of Birds were I was due to help with a mist netting demonstration with Slimbridge’s onsite ringers Maurice & Brian. However the number of people turning up for the duck decoy demonstrations, meant that I had to give a helping hand with this, so I spent the majority of my time ringing ducks.

Here’s several photos from the past two days….

Zen our decoy dog, who probably has the most important job by acting/looking like a fox & getting the ducks to follow her into the trap!

Teal - the most common duck caught this weekend with 36 captured. 31 new birds & 5 recaptures.

Followed by Pintail with 31 new birds & 1 recapture.

A male (above) & female Shelduck, both new birds being captured.

Gadwall often look very dull on the first appearance, however having them in the hand & being able to seem them close up just shows colourful they can be! 4 birds followed Zen into the decoy, 3 of these being new birds & 1 recapture.

and of course the Decoy Demonstration proving to be highly popular, this allowed us to promote wildfowl ringing to this weekends visitors! Above being shown how we weigh the birds, and below showing our visitors some of our recoveries that we’ve had of Slimbridge ringed birds.

Our duck hut, complete with it’s roaring fire (most welcome this weekend) after a busy few days housing 100’s of people!…… Well they didn’t all fit in at once!

In total Zen & ‘her’ team managed to capture 70 duck over the weekend – consisting of 62 new birds & 8 recaps/controls.

Saturday evening I was supposed to travel to Norfolk with my colleague Richard Hearn to cannon net Greylag Geese – however the snow we’ve experience this weekend soon put stop to that!

A snow covered Rushy Pen holding it’s hungry wildfowl!

But as much as I moaned about the snow this weekend! It was a real privilege to be asked to do the 18:30 commentated swan feed in the snow! An awesome experience that I’m lucky to get to do after a busy day in work!

The end of a fantastic weekend, and the thing I’ve enjoyed the most was being able to speak to our members & visitors and sharing our wildfowl ringing with them……..