Back at the 'Obs'

It was a 5.30 a.m. start for Craig, Ian and I at Rossall this morning. When the clocks go forward early on Sunday morning we will get a brief respite from very early mornings, but it doesn't last long! We had clear skies this morning with a light south-southeasterly wind and a light ground frost.

As soon as it was light birds, Lesser Redpoll being the first, were on the move. The 'vis' wasn't heavy but did include 19 Lesser Redpolls, 5 Alba Wags, 109 Meadow Pipits, 2 Chaffinch, Grey Wagtail, 5 Siskins and Reed Bunting. The only grounded birds were two mega's, of the same species, for the site in the shape of Tree Sparrows! We always get a few going over on 'vis' in autumn but it was good to have 2 birds grounded for a while. They were perched up in the central hedgerow and then after a couple of minutes they took off, circled round climbing and headed north. Migration in the raw; brilliant!

Of course we had our mist nets up and we processed 15 new birds (recaptures in brackets) as follows:

Greenfinch - 1
Meadow Pipit - 5
Pied Wagtail - 1
Dunnock - 1 (1)
Chaffinch - 1
Linnet - 6
Robin - (1)

 Linnet

 Pied Wagtail

Unfortunately I am working tomorrow morning so it will be Saturday before I can back to the 'obs' again but thankfully the forecast at the moment looks okay for both Saturday and Sunday, so another weekend of migration monitoring is hopefully in store!