Monday 23 May 2011

Warbler recoveries, France 2009

The latest recovery information from the BTO includes four warblers ringed within a few days of each other in 2009 that were recovered in France the following month. Click below for full details.


2009 recoveries and controls report

Sunday 15 May 2011

A New Dawn Arrives At Stanford

Anticipating that it would turn windy by mid morning, we arrived at 0500 hrs to clear skies, with little or no breeze, to operate our standard net runs whilst based on the disused railtrack. With very little bird movement we managed a creditable 11 new birds, (which included 3 Garden Warblers, 2 Whitethroat and a Lesser Whitethroat) and 27 retraps in four hours before the wind curtailed the mist net operation. Making his first visit (hopefully of many) to the ringing group was Mike Alibone, the Northamptonshire Recorder and his account of the morning can be found here: link

With the taking down of the mist nets left to a chosen few, a round of the nest boxes was undertaken by the remainder of the group which resulted in a  total of 135 pulli being ringed - one Tawny Owl, 74 Blue Tit, 55 Great Tit and 5 Tree Sparrow

As well as Mike joining us for the morning we also met Dawn, our latest recruit, who seems to have enjoyed the experience:


Tawny Owl Chick snuggles up to Dawn

Sunday 1 May 2011

April At Stanford

April is always a relatively quiet time at Stanford as the resident birds and returning migrants set up their territories and remain fairly sedentary.  Consequently, catches are usually quite small and the expectation of up to 15 new birds a session is the norm.  Although the month was dry, we did experience several windy mornings which scuppered our activities but despite this two or three of us did manage a total of eight ringing sessions which resulted in 138 new birds being ringed - a record for April - of 24 species.

The numbers of warblers are encouraging with new birds (and retraps in brackets) as follows:
Sedge Warbler 14 (10)
Reed Warbler 2 (5)
Lesser Whitethroat 1
Whitethroat  6 (9)
Garden Warbler 1 (1)
Blackcap 14 (2)
Chiffchaff 11 (7)
Willow Warbler 15 (24)

Also encouraging were the numbers of
Tree Sparrow 13 (7)
Linnet 16 (1)
Reed Bunting 10 (31)

Full species summary

Relaxing between net rounds
Interesting retraps this month included two Long-tailed Tits from 2005 and 2006 whilst the returning migrants consisted of three Chiffchaffs, twelve Willow Warblers (with two of the these having been ringed as adults in 2007),  a Reed Warbler ringed in 2003 and another in 2006. 
However, the star bird so far is Whitethroat R 650913.  Originally ringed as a 4 female on 24/7/04 it is 95 days short of the European longevity record for this species which we currently hold at Stanford.
However this bird is older by at least a year as it was ringed as an adult whereas the current record is of a bird ringed as a juvenile. 
 With not much flying about, we did look skywards on one occasion to see this
Red-flanked Bluetail ?