A Good Selection of July Birds

Ian and I ventured forth to the reedbed this morning for a crack of dawn start to a ringing session and the crack of dawn is flipping early at this time of the year! We were greeted with 4 oktas cloud cover and a 5-10 mph NE wind. It was a little slow to start with and then it picked up.

Between net rounds we talked about the fact that even though we ringed in a wet reedbed with willow carr, we didn't really catch many Reed Buntings as there's only about 3-4 pairs on site. A few hours later we had ringed 25 birds and 9 of them were Reed Bunts!

 Reed Bunting

We also talked about the fact that at this time of year at certain sites, it is often hard to tell what are grounded migrants and what are local breeding birds dispersing. We caught a juv Garden Warbler this morning, which would almost certainly have been a grounded migrant based on the fact that they don't breed any where around the obs.

Garden Warbler

As I said before we ringed 25 birds and recaptured (brackets) 3 birds as follows:

Goldfinch - 2
Reed Warbler - 4
Lesser Whitethroat - 1
Chaffinch - 1
Reed Bunting - 9
Blackcap - 1
Whitethroat - 1 (1)
Garden Warbler - 1
Dunnock - 1
Greenfinch - 1
Willow Warbler - 1 (1)
Wren - 1
Blackbird - 1
Great Tit - (1)

Goldfinch

At this time of year we start to check the reedbeds around the obs for Swallow roosts and yesterday evening Ian had about 100 coming into roost. It's not just Swallows that roost in the reeds, but Starlings as well and this morning as we were putting the nets up we had about 3,000 exiting their roost.

A calling Great Spotted Woodpecker was a little unusual for the site and we had some vis in the form of a single Siskin heading east. The only raptor we had was a Peregrine flying over with large prey (Pigeon?) and it was flying very slowly and flapping very hard as it struggled to transport its meal to a favoured plucking post.