North Wilts Group

As ever, our ringing lives are dominated by weather and with today being forecast as zero wind this was the right time to be ringing the most amazing farmland bird site that there is. This is the site of the very first Higher Level Stewardship Scheme with specific features tailored to Tree Sparrows based on my work on the site since 1999. When feeding this site for the past two months I have seen clouds of Tree Sparrows swirling up and down the hedgerow and with the perfect weather it really did feel like this may be the only chance to ring this fabulous place this winter.

With the weather still too breezy for the exposed sites on the downs we opted for a site sheltered from the west wind but until lunchtime the weather was much calmer than forecast and we enjoyed a lovely sunny morning. We had a good team out today again joined by Will from Oxford and we needed it as we had a steady procession of birds into our small and compact net set. This is one of my favourite sites and consists of a dense hedgerow adjacent to a mixed plantation. The main object of the day was to retrap Tree Sparrows and Yellowhammers and we succeeded pretty well with 6 Tree Sparrows of which three were ringed as nestlings last year and two of them were from the same brood. The Yellowhammers provided a much more interesting dataset:

With the wind and rain finally letting up enough to get a mornings rining in we ventured out to a relatively new site in the woodland at the farm this morning which was away from our normal ringing area around two small lakes and a reed bed. As this usual site is right next to a river it floods the lakes and all the net rides whenever there is heavy rain. With the amount that's been coming down recently you would have needed a submarine to get nets into the reed bed. Even though the water had dropped down considerably over the last few days the trackways are now extremely muddy and fallen trees and dead wood are now throughout the net rides. Because of this we set up the new feeding station on dry land about a 1/4 mile away. 

As we're nearer to the main woodland we caught a lot of new tits but still managed enough finches to make it worthwhile even if nothing particularly interesting was caught.

We noticed more than Chaffinch's than usual with their papillomatosis/cnemidocoptosis leg problems and at one point had to discard 5 birds from just one net round. We usually see just one bird like it every other session so either these birds may not be local to us or there has been something of an outbreak around us. A reasonable if not spectacular morning with 45 new, 22 retrap PD/GD

Robin 2(3), Dunncok 3(1), Wren 1, Blackbird 2(1), Long Tailed Tit 5(2), Coal Tit (1), Blue 6(6), Great Tit 6(6), Treecreeper (1), Goldfinch 1, Chaffinch 9, Greenfinch 9(1)

Last weeks water level, 3ft above the bank of the river

At last we had a break in the rain and wind and we woke to a clear, cold calm morning. It was a very early start as we set a row of nets across a conservation crop with Skylark being the target bird. We also set a net for Linnets where I have been feeding rape seed and a set of 6 nets near a hedgerow where I have been feeding millet and barley. A walk through the cover crop just before dawn rewarded us with 4 Skylarks – we don’t manage to ring this species every year but we have done okay in recent years as we make more effort. A pair of Grey Partridge narrowly avoided the nets, it is about time that we ringed one of these again as we have had a few near misses in recent years.

The Linnet net inexplicably was a complete failure. The other net set was reasonable but we didn’t get a big enough sample considering the number of birds present. One of the main reasons that we ring these sites in the winter is to retrap the Tree Sparrows that we ring in the summer and on this day we retrapped two that were ringed as nestlings 3 miles south in July 2013. We ringed a Corn Bunting which is the first ringed with an individually numbered darvic that we will be using from now on, we just need to work out how to catch more to increase our resighting rate.

Once we had finished I then went up and reccied the other conservation cover about 300 metres away and watched a lovely flock of over 200 Corn Buntings plus about 30 Skylarks. I have put a battery of baited walk in traps in this crop in readiness for another day. I then spent the rest of the day putting up more nest boxes for Tree Sparrows and feeding three other farmland sites. I finished twelve hours after the day started, absolutely exhausted from carrying so many sacks of grain. MP, PA

Skylark 4, Yellowhammer 36, Corn Bunting 1, Reed Bunting 2, Tree Sparrow 7 (2), Blackbird 1 (2), Dunnock 1, Linnet 1, Chaffinch 1 (1)

With Matt, Olly and myself all in The Gambia there hasn't been much home ringing going on during the last two weeks.

The group managed to catch over 2500 birds including over 300 Western Palearctic's which was good going considering the 42°c temperatures. Some of the highlights are on the photos below.

Blue Cheeked Bee-eater, Shikra, Grey Headed Kingfisher, Klass's Cuckoo, Senegal Batis

Sulphur-breated Bush Shrike, Little Crake, Western Bonelli's Warbler, Yellow-fronted Tinkerbird