After a considerable delay in our blogging we have a report from three sessions carried out on the 17th, 18th and 19th of July.
17th July
This was our weekly session working behind the sand martin colony. This involves the checking of the nesting boxes to monitor activity and record the progress of nests for submission as nest records. This is predominantly carried out by the indefatigable Doug who uses an endoscope to check each of the nests. Several of us join him on each session to ring any pulli ready for rings. This time we ringed a total of 33 nestlings from 8 of the boxes.
18th July
We made a very early start trying to catch more adult sand martins in front of the sand martin bank at the Seaton Wetlands. A team of ringers set out very early to set the nets before dawn. We were soon catching birds and had a total of 68 birds.
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| The team at work |
22 of these were new birds, all of which were adult birds. The remaining 46 retraps were all mostly adults, with only seven captures of this year's juvenile birds. This fits very well with the idea that the young birds only stay around the colony for a short while and then roost away from the colony and so are not caught in the early morning.
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| Processing one of the sand martins |
19th July
We set out again with intentions to do some general mist netting in the hope of catching our resident reed warblers, but also some migrating warblers. The Wetlands sees good numbers of sedge warbler and willow warbler stopping on passage south for the winter.
The weather was not ideal so we made our base in the Discovery Hut. This is used by the Wetlands as a focal point for visitors and has been designed with ringing demonstrations in mind and has displays and information for visitors as well as refreshments for thirsty ringers! This meant that as the morning wore on we attracted a number of visitors who we share our activities with. We try to inform about our activities, the birds that we are studying and about the Wetlands as an important local nature reserve.
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| Yours truly showing one of the birds to the public... |
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| ... while Dan gets ready to process another. |
The mornings ringing proved very successful. We had a total of 75 birds, with good numbers of reed warblers with 16 new birds and 12 recaptures. Sedge warblers ran the reed warblers a close second, with 22 news birds and 1 retrap. Many of these sedge warblers were carrying large deposits of fat. This year so far, ringing in the same areas on a number of occasions, we have caught only two sedge warblers. These suggest these birds are on passage and heading south for the winter.
We also caught four juvenile stonechats indicating that there has been successful breeding on the reserve.
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| One of the stonechats... |
Other interesting birds included five sand martins and a house sparrow. The sand martins were four unringed juvenile birds, which we presume are birds also on passage or local birds from other colonies prospecting the surrounding area, and one juvenile from the bank. While we do catch house sparrows on the Wetlands they are generally not in the area we were ringing on this occasion so this was a nice record. Hopefully there will be more!
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| ... and the house sparrow. |
And we caught a blackcap which had begun a main moult of its flight feathers, providing an excellent training opportunity.
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| Two new primaries about half grown, one just appearing from pin and the rest are old primaries |
We also caught a kingfisher which, as always, drew an admiring audience from those people nearby at the time and so generating a great deal of interest from members of the public.
The total of birds for the session was
Species New birds Retraps
Reed Warbler 16 12
Sedge Warbler 22 1
Blue Tit 3 1
Stonechat 4
Cetti’s Warbler 3
Sand Martin 4 1
Chiffchaff 1
Willow Warbler 2
House Sparrow 1
Blackcap 1
Reed Bunting 1
Kingfisher 1
Wren 1
