A Dusting of Warblers

Ian and I met at the obs in the half-light this morning and it was too windy to operate mist nets so we relocated to the Nature Park. It was still quite windy here as the tail end of the front that had moved through the night, lifted the wind and dumped some 'wet stuff'on us was just moving away to the east. The wind at first was a good 15 mph WSW, but as the front moved away it dropped to 5-10 mph WSW at first and then swung to SW.

Once the front had cleared it was obvious that it had dropped some birds, as we extracted four birds from the first net, that were all Warblers and four different species! In the end from just two nets we processed 25 new birds as follows (recaptures in brackets):

Sedge Warbler - 1
Lesser Whitethroat - 1
Reed Warbler - 7
Garden Warbler - 1
Whitethroat - 2
Blue Tit - 1
Blackcap - 4
Dunnock - 2 (1)
Willow Warbler - 3
Wren - 2
Greenfinch - 1

Blackcap

The weather brought some other good birds in as well as we had a Yellow Wagtail calling from the pool. We put Yellow Wag on the MP3 just in case, but it had no affect. Whilst checking one of the nets Ian heard a Tree Sparrow (a good bird here) and it was moving around a Hawthorn. Again, an MP3 player was switched to 'Tree Sparrow'; we didn't catch the Tree Sparrow, but instead three Tree Sparrows flew out and climbed to the east.

Garden Warbler

During one of our coffee breaks we noticed all the Gulls getting up and low and behold a Buzzard was slowly drifting south with a 'Larus' escort! The fourth decent bird of the morning was when Ian picked up a wader, in the corner of his eye, dropping onto the pool. A quick look on the pool revealed a Ruff as it got up flushed by some Gulls coming in to bathe.

 Lesser Whitethroat

Other birds seen this morning included Swift, Sand Martin, 10 Pied Wagtails, 14 Linnets and a Stock Dove. It looks like we might get out again in the morning, so watch this space.

 Whitethroat

Thanks to Wendy for the Welsh Dragon sausage butty. Awesome!

Willow Warbler

We received a bunch of recoveries from the BTO this week and they were quite good. Quite a few re-sightings of color ringed Coots, a Reed Bunting to Leighton Moss, a Goldfinch to Walney BO, and a Siskin to Loch Lomond. However, the best of the lot was a Blue Tit that we ringed at the 'obs' on 26.3.11 that was controlled two weeks later 43 km to the south at Hightown, Merseyside!