Well I got a text later yesterday from Mick suggesting we went ringing in the morning. I thought he must be mad, its going to be far to windy for ringing. Anyway I agreed to meet him at 06.00 hrs on the old rail track as normal. To my surprise when we got to the site it was breezy but not too bad. So we erected nets that had a slight protection from the wind by the large hedge which runs the length of the track.We set the MP3 players on the Latvian love song and waited. On the first net round half of the nets were empty and I wondered if we had made a mistake in coming out. However by the next round we had changed some of the MP3's to Goldfinch and Greenfinch and a 20' through the hedge to Yellowhammer, things started to improve.At one point I was sitting having a well deserved cup of coffee when Mick shouted 'OH NO'!!!! . He had seen a large flock of Starlings fly straight towards the small net through the hedge. So we quickly went to check it before they managed to damaged the net.
Fortunately we had only caught the one. Then came the problem of ageing and sexing it. Where was our expert Starling ringer (Dawn ) when you needed her??? Out came Svensson. By the end of the day we had had a really successful day of 119 new birds and 15 retraps. The bulk of the numbers were made up of 41 Greenfich, 23 Goldfinch and 11 Yellowhammers, but we did catch 2 Blackcaps and 2 Chiffchaffs together with 8 Redwing which was nice. A very good decision by Mick with the text. Thanks
Oh I wish I had been there! I shall have to give up working for a living I think :o)
ReplyDeleteIf there were that many flying over, you probably caught a few but they are expert at using 16mm mesh as a ladder and climb straight out the pocket - it's amazing to watch!