Mainly Reeds

After two hours sleep you can't beat getting up at 0430 to go ringing! Maybe not the two hours sleep, but I was looking forward to a good ringing session this morning. I met Kim and Ian at the reedbeds at 0530 and we proceeded to put three nets up in the willow scrub. We had full cloud cover with a 5 mph ESE wind.

It seemed very quiet when we were putting the nets up and our ringing totals confirmed this with just ten birds ringed as follows:

Reed Warbler - 8
Willow Warbler - 1
Whitethroat - 1

 Whitethroat

From a birding perspective it was quiet too. About a thousand Starlings exited their reedbed roost, a long way from our nets thankfully, and the only other thing of note were the small numbers of House Martins and Swifts hawking insects low down. In fact we cut another ride that we will hopefully be able to tape lure the House Martins down to, so I'll let you know how that works when we next go.

I had a look on the pools on my way out and there were 24 Coots, a male Pochard, twelve Little Grebes and eight Tufted Ducks.

It's looking like Friday morning for our next ringing session, so I'll keep you posted.