Sunday, 13 January 2013

Few Birds and No Pictures

It was a frosty start for Craig, Huw and I at the feeding station this morning and when it is frosty it can work in two ways; it can either bring more birds in, or move birds away and this morning it was the latter.

We ringed 11 birds as follows (recaptures in brackets):

Chaffinch - 6 (3)
Goldfinch - 2 (1)
Tree Sparrow - 2
Blue Tit - 1 (2)

As I have stated numerous times before it is really difficult to estimate the number of birds visiting the feeding station when you are ringing, so all I will say is that there were less Chaffinch and Tree Sparrows than a couple of days ago.

Pink-footed Geese were moving around this morning and about three hundred were moving in all directions to feed in flocks of varying sizes. We only had a couple of Corn Buntings this morning and only singles of Reed Bunting, Yellowhammer, Brambling and Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Raptors were represented by a single Buzzard and a Peregrine that shot past the front of a woodland and then returned on the other side. On the way off the site a couple of Little Owls were perched up in one of their favourite, infrequent locations, if that isn't too much of a contradiction of terms!

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