Sunday 29 July 2012

And The Swallows Were Ready

Ian and I had our first Swallow ringing session in the wet reedbed last night and managed to ring 40 Swallows, control one and ring a single Reed Warbler. The ring number of the controlled bird was D006605. It was difficult to tell how many Swallows were coming into roost, but probably not as many as the 1,000 counted a few evenings ago. We will carefully monitor the numbers roosting and hopefully have a couple of catches in the week.

Swallow

2 comments:

Warren Baker said...

What percentage were birds of the year ? Just curious about their breeding success this year mate :-)

The Hairy Birder said...

We have ringed 117 Swallows at our roost since Saturday Warren and only 5 have been adults, so that means that nearly 96% have been birds of the year. This has surprised us somewhat as we expected the percentage of juveniles to be less based on the summer we've had. It will be interesting ro see if this percentage changes over the coming days and weeks. Cheers, Seumus