A Weekend away

Last weekend I went to see my parents in Gloucestershire. The main reason was to drop off a mothers day card in person (hope you had a good day mum!). The secondary reason was to see my dad and do some ringing at his house on Saturday. Apart from half an hour when I had to close the nets due to rain, I did reasonably well, including adding 3 new species for this site!

Above: An adult male Sparrowhawk. This is the first male I've ringed. Last time I ringed here, a sparrowhawk escaped as I approached the net so it was nice to get one on the next attempt!

Above: A female Siskin. Like a lot of people this winter, my dad is reporting Siskins coming to his garden feeders for the first time ever (he's been there about 20 years). At least one male was around but it firmly decided against carrying a ring on its leg despite flirting with the idea several times!

Above: A big, fat Woodpigeon. Enough said!

As well as the 3 new species, a retrap House Sparrow (ringed Nov 2012) was notable as the first retrap of this species (House Sparrows are notorious for being hard to recapture) and as usual for this site, a whole bunch of Blue Tits.

Ringing totals for the day (retraps in brackets)



Blue Tit 18 (7)

Great Tit 3 (1)

Coal Tit 2 (2)

House Sparrow 1 (1)

Woodpigeon 1 (0)

Siskin 1 (0)

Sparrowhawk 1 (0)

Dunnock 2 (2)

Normally I would expect the ratio of Blue Tits to Great Tits to be more even than this, but this area is unusual (at least I think so) in that the number of Blue Tits far outweigh the number of Great Tits.

I've been out strimming grass all week so far for work in far from ideal weather conditions. Strimming will continue until Friday, only punctuated by a day scrub clearing and burning on Thursday. I'm hoping conditions will improve, at the very least by the weekend.