10 Out Of 10

I've had a busy this week, with plenty of site visits looking at upland breeding wader habitat and carrying out a few breeding bird surveys, so it is only now that I have had time to report back on our recent check of our Pied Flycatcher boxes.

On Monday, Gail and I checked our boxes in the Hodder Valley, and we still needed to lift two female Pied Flycatchers from the nest to make it 10 out of 10. And we did it! That's all ten females that are nesting in our boxes lifted off the nest and recorded. This combined with the number of eggs laid, date of laying, date of clutch completed, number of chicks hatched, number of chicks fledged and all chicks ringed, provides some very powerful biological data that is essential to the on-going conservation monitoring of this red-listed species! Oh, and if we can catch a few of the males in the boxes, that makes it all the more powerful.

We did manage to ring one brood of six Pied Flycatchers, and also eleven Great Tits (two broods), nine Blue Tits (one brood) and seven Nuthatches (one brood).

 Nuthatch

Talking of Nuthatches, take a look at the two pictures below. The first shows the chicks in the box on 16th May and the second how they looked on th 27th. How they've grown, they look like Nuthatches now!

 

As I mentioned before it's been all work and no play, so I am looking forward to running my moth trap tonight for the first time in a week, and checking our boxes at weekend. I'll keep you posted as to how we get on.