Sand Martin cliff

Work on the Sand Martin cliff continued, and in the end Doug & James removed quite a few of the shelves which make up the entrance tunnels to the nesting chambers. The wooden shelves were replaced with  black drainage pipes, so it will be interesting to see if the Sand Martins have a preference for the old wooden tunnels or the new plastic ones. 

The replaced rotten shelves

Doug inserting one of the new entrance tubes

Each of the 252 nest chambers were opened, inspected & if they had been used, cleaned out. It was usually possible to work out if the nests had been used by one or two broods, as the nesting material was generally in much better condition in the single-brood boxes.

Double-brood nest on the left, single on the right

In nest chambers that hadn't been used, we put some clean hay as a 'starter nest' as we had heard anecdotal evidence that this may encourage the use of the chamber. In chambers that had been used, we generally removed the old nesting material and left clean sand with 'drag' marks so that it will be easier to see if birds have been into the chamber. The G section, which is the section furthest away from the path has been renamed the 'flea' section. Interestingly, we even found fleas in some of the chambers where there had been no nest, so are wondering if the fleas have come from birds roosting in the chambers over the winter rather than from the Sand Martins.  Any chamber with fleas was emptied completely, and fresh sand added. 

Fleas

There's been other wildlife in the chambers, mainly in the G/flea section:

Giant House Spider (and it was a giant!)

Peacock Butterfly

Moth cases....a few were infested

False Black Widow? 

Our Sand Martins probably overwinter in Senegal, and they should be leaving there this month, arriving back here in early to mid-March. We're looking forward to welcoming them, and hope they'll be happy with our house-keeping activities!

Mist netting 7/2/26

Ordinarily we may well have cancelled the session on Saturday morning as the forecast was iffy to say the least. However, as we were going to be on site anyway for the afternoon's AGM, we decided to give it a go. We were late starting to set up due to a deluge, but once the rain stopped, three of us put up four nets in the reeds & feeders behind the Discovery Hut. We only put up one feeder net rather than the usual two as the brook had burst its bank in one place & overtopped it in another, so was actually running through the second net ride. We were later joined by two new members who had an introduction to ringing, and who will hopefully be joining us again. 

We actually caught a few birds, with a nice range of species. We caught two Kingfishers, or rather three but one escaped before we could get to it.  It's always nice to be able to show birds to visitors to the reserve, and explain what ringing's all about.  Kingfishers are always a favourite, and we were sent some amazing photos taken by visitor Helen Warren. 

Helen also captured a lovely close-up of a Wren. 

One of the retraps was a female Blackbird originally ringed on 3/6/24. As an adult, the feathers of the wing were all uniform, and the tail was broad & in good condition. 

Adult female Blackbird

Wing of adult Blackbird

Tail of adult Blackbird

We had to close the nets a few times during showers, but on the whole it wasn't as wet as forecast & we were treated to a rather nice rainbow.

	Ringed	Retrapped
Blackbird		2
Blue Tit	2
Chaffinch	3	1
Chiffchaff	1
Dunnock	1	2
Greenfinch	1
Kingfisher	1	1
Treecreeper	1
Wren		1
	10	7