Another Windy Week

Masai Mick sums up another week of poor ringing weather

Well weather wise we got off to another awful week with strong winds on both Monday and Tuesday making it impossible to ring.  Wednesday was not a great deal better but I had had enough of sitting around at home by then so off I went to Stanford.  I was home by 10:30 having caught 43 birds, 39 being new - these were mainly Blackcap and Chiffchaff but I also managed to catch our first Meadow Pipit of the year.  

Thursday dawned with not a breath of wind and stayed like it all day.  Just as well as it is one of our usual ringing days and Jacana John and Adam joined me for what turned out to be a great morning’s ringing. We managed 154 birds of which 133 were new and again Blackcap and Chiffchaff dominated the catch but surprisingly we also caught 47 Meadow Pipits which is a staggering number for us, as our best annual total to date is only 30 birds.  

Meadow Pipit                                                                   jgc

Flushed with Thursday’s success I could not resist going out on Friday catching a further 89 birds for my trouble - 80 of these were new birds with another new species for the year being two Lesser Redpolls.  These are really nice finches that I look forward to catching each year, usually in October, so these two individuals were slightly early than usual.  

The final session of the week took place on Saturday and we managed 63 birds caught with 56 being new. Nothing was caught that we were not expecting – it was just more of the same but the wind with the odd sudden light rain shower was becoming tiresome to say the least. It was very good to welcome Dawn back after her recent stay in hospital and a pleasure to meet Andy who will be acting as her chauffer for a while. 

The week's totals: