Burry Inlet Oystercatchers

This weekend three of the group went to Whiteford Burrows on the North Gower coast to help with the annual visit to ring Oystercatchers in the Burry Inlet.

This long running project, started in 1990, provides data on survival rates and body condition at this important site. The Burry Inlet contains the largest continuous area of saltmarsh in Wales and vast areas of intertidal sand.
With equiment from the SCAN wader ringing group and Steve Dodds, we had a successful catch of 175 Oystercatchers. One was a very old bird, ringed across the estuary at Burry Port in 1991.
A beautiful if rather windswept site at which to spend the morning.

Although one of the team seemed to enjoy sitting in the windiest spot!

 Once ringed, and aged,a set of standard measurements were taken by two processing teams

and moult score was recorded

Thanks to Dave Coker, Steve and Rachel for an interesting and enjoyable weekend. 

The National Trust bunkhouse at Cwm Ivy was an excellent base and highly recommended for a group stay
For further reading on this work on Oystercatchers see this interesting paper from 2010
Analyses of Oystercatcher body condition and survival on the Burry Inlet SPA
( Burton, N.H.K., Wright, L.J., Coker, D. & Dodd, S.G. 2010.  CCW Contract Science Report No:
952, 28pp, CCW/BTO.)

Hopefully the wind will drop sometime this week to enable us to get out ringing on the Teifi Marsh.