Sunday 31 July 2011

From Acros to Hirundines

Ian and I spent the dawn and dusk periods in the reedbeds at Fleetwood yesterday targeting warblers in the morning and Swallows in the evening. At first light it was surprisingly cold and I even had to put on a woolly hat whilst putting the nets up. This was short-lived as it soon warmed up.

Walking back to the cars Ian picked up a Kingfisher calling and it headed to the area where we had some nets up but unfortunately we didn't catch it. It was very quiet with little moving over head other than a few hirundines and Swifts. Two Stock Doves and a singing Grasshopper Warbler were probably the best birds seen or heard during the morning.

We managed to ring only 19 birds as follows:

Reed Bunting - 1
Goldfinch - 2
Whitethroat - 3
Chaffinch - 1
Reed Warbler - 6
Blackcap - 1
Dunnock - 1
Greenfinch - 1
Wren - 1
Willow Warbler - 1
Sedge Warbler - 1

 Blackcap

 Chaffinch
 
We were back in the evening to 'work' the Swallow roost and we managed to ring 131. Only three of these were adults and we also caught a leucistic bird that was a beige colour. We caught a single Sedge Warbler and when I got it out of the net I could see that it had a French ring on it! A cracking end to a cracking day.

Swallow

Leucistic Swallow

2 comments:

Iain Barr said...

great swallow. Can i ask what the wing wear was like on this leucistic bird? also what age was it?
good work-131 is great!

The Hairy Birder said...

Hello Roger, I'm afraid that this bird was processed late on when we were anxious to get the birds back into the roost, so it only received a cursory look so I wouldn't be able to comment in detail on wing wear. It was aged as a 3J and from memory I would say that the wing wear was similar to the other 3Js. Cheers, Seumus