Garden by day and fields at night..

The windy weather continues, greatly limiting the opportunity to open mist nets. A brief respite allowed a session with our trainee, Ryan.

This was his first experience of garden ringing so two new species for him but common in the garden; Greenfinch and Great Spotted Woodpecker. A Blackcap caught was the second this week, the first was carrying a lot of fat and weighed a massive 22.3 g!

This was a new Great Spotted Woodpecker, the 21st in my garden since 2008. We also caught a retrap ringed 3 years ago and not seen since.
On Sunday there was an even shorter gap in the weather but it gave a chance for Mark, the Assistant Warden on Bardsey, to ring with us before his return the island. A Nuthatch was a new species in the hand for him - not many of those on Bardsey!

The windy weather does mean it is good for lamping. We have walked many miles in the last week but few birds caught in the continuing mild weather. Golden Plover numbers are increasing slowly at one of our sites.

We mostly catch young birds

 so it was good to compare with an adult

Woodcock numbers in our usually good fields are very low. Owen in Mid Wales has already caught over 100 but we have only caught four.

Many fields are still ungrazed with very lush and long wet grass and others have what seems to be a lot more sheep than usual. Hopefully numbers will increase soon.
This picture illustrates how good the fields can be with birds previously ringed or retrapped shown. During last nights walk shown of 3.5km we only saw 2 Woodcock.

Unusually, no Fieldfare were seen and just a couple of Skylark, one of which we caught.