Three Boys

These three pictures, taken on the 18th of April, illustrate the wide range of plumages that male Linnets can display going into the breeding season:

 This one has no red on it at all, only by parting the breast feathers can you see broad brown tips on the feathers, distinguishing it from a purely streaky female. It was first captured as a juvenile in July 2017.

A typical example, this was an adult when first captured in June 2017.

 

An extreme case, bringing to mind birds typically seen in the Mediterranean at this time of year, and technically known as a 'stonker'. This one was also fledged prior to 2017.

 

I've spoken before about Linnets appearing in West Wales in the spring with bleached primary tips, a feature more usually seen on warblers that spend the winter somewhere considerably sunnier than Ceredigion. This female, fledged in 2017, shows the feature well. The brown tips are the parts of the primaries that are exposed to sunlight when the wing is closed.

The first Spring migrants arrive...

In the early morning, usually pre dawn, we open the 5 nets that are sited around Mallard Pond. Until the 5th April Reed Buntings were the main target for our RAS though in the evenings we were catching a few Pied Wagtails and enjoying the 2-300 hirundines feeding.

On Sunday the 8th April at least three Sedge Warblers were singing and Andrew and I caught our 1st Sedge Warbler of the year. Not until the 12th did we catch our 2nd Sedge. This Sedge had a fat score of 4 and weighed 13.5g unlike the 1st bird with no fat and weighed 10.9g

Our 2nd Sedge Warbler with most of Mallard Pond in the background.

We did catch our 1st Cetti's Warbler of the year on the 9th which surprisingly was unringed, but the star bird that morning was a male Reed Bunting we ringed in August 2011...approaching 7 years old.

Mallard Pond with a setting sun...

In the evening the Teifi Marshes are a great attraction for hirundines and wagtails. Peak counts of over 100 White Wagtails are recorded and we have a recovery of a ringed male to Iceland. Swallows and Sand Martins both occur in the 100s and feed on the pre dusk feast of insects. Catching these species in Spring is less successful than Autumn and we caught our 1st White Wagtails on the 11th April.

We have taken the Mallard nets down for a few days due to poor weather and a visit to Skokholm Bird Observatory.
We will be back on the 27th and ready for the main passage of Sedge Warblers here to refuel on stopover and the arrival of our breeding Reed Warblers

Karen has been ringing on Goodwick Moor including catching the 1st Willow Warblers - 5 on 13th April and she heard the 1st Grasshopper Warbler singing too.

At Mwnt we catch migrant Wheatears in spring traps, Wendy with Charlie and Alison caught our 1st of the year on the 27th March in between whoosh net catches for our Linnet RAS project.

We catch breeding Siskins as part of a RAS study as well as migrant wintering birds.

A quick summary of birds at my Boncath site, so far in April (1-13th) I have caught 9 females with brood patch 3 and 22 males with active CP.

(photos Wendy J)

Return to the reed bed

With the end of March fast approaching, it was time last week to prepare our reed bed nets ready for Spring migration. A look back at previous years shows that the first Sand Martins and White Wagtails have been caught at the end of March but not this year.
Unfortunately, persistent wind and a drop in temperature has slowed down our effort but the most notable species caught during the week was Reed Buntings.

Another 6 added to our colour ring study birds. The colour rings enable the birds to be encountered again without catching them as the colour rings can be easily read and the unique combination enables us to look up where and when the bird was ringed. Over the winter, several different birds have been spotted around the feeders at the Visitor Centre and along the cycle track through the reserve.

The oldest male seen over the winter was ringed in 2014 and seen each year since.
Thanks again to the photographers who keep a look out for our colour ringed birds. Particularly valuable are records from April 1st - Aug 31st, the period of our RAS study

Just one Pied Wagtail was ringed last week but on two evenings around 100 have been seen going to roost. The Teifi Marsh is a major stop over site for White Wagtails on migration to Iceland and many have been ringed by us, with one recovery from Iceland. All we need is a window in the weather..!!

Looking ahead to our CES season, we have been able to purchase new bamboo poles thanks to a successful grant application to the BTO.

The Linnet project continues at Mwnt but low numbers for the last two weeks possibly implies that our wintering population has moved north and our breeding population have yet to arrive. We did catch a smart male Stonechat though.

and the first Wheatear of the year. The headland is good for migrant Wheatear but very few have been seen so far this year.

Another returning migrant ringed this week was a male Blackcap with a fat score of 5 ! It was in  my garden at the same time as a Brambling. Both unusual birds in the garden but never before at the same time.

And now we wait for better weather....

More Foreign Fun - Urra

I'm just back from a trip to the Urra Field Centre in Almeria Province, Spain, where I was helping students studying Ecology & Conservation Biology at Leeds University with some of their field projects.

My specific role (assisting ex-pat ringer and external tutor Richard Banham) was to supply birds to two groups of students, a trio of undergraduates whose field project concerned the relationship between feather-mite load and the morphology of the uropygial gland, and a pair of masters students investigating the differences in fat and muscle scores in migratory and resident species (not as simple as you might think - how often do we look at the fat on non-migratory birds?).

Ed - Richard - Kieran - Marnie - Lewis - Roxanne

 Other groups of students were working on flowers, ants, bees, spiders, scorpions, lizards, and so on.

The species providing the bulk of the data were House Sparrows, Sardinian Warblers, Robins and Blackcaps, all of which we were colour ringing as part of other long-term studies...

 ...but of course there was also a nice supporting cast of other species for me to ring:

Rock Sparrow

Corn Bunting

Cirl Bunting

Black Redstart (male)

Black Redstart (female)

Bluethroat

Blue Rock Thrush

Also Siskin, Chaffinch, Greenfinch, Spotless Starling, Song Thrush, Chiffchaff, Willow Warbler, Whitethroat, Common Redstart, Great Tit and Thekla Lark.

My bogey-bird was the Great Spotted Cuckoo, of which there were a pair in the area, but once one of them had managed to escape from a net just before I reached it, they weren't going to be caught again. At least I managed a decent picture of one of them.

This is very dry country at the best of times - just down the road from Tabernas desert where there was once a thriving industry making Western films such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - and not helped by the extraction of groundwater on an industrial scale for vast new plantations of olive trees. This Spring has been particularly dry there, and there was as well a worrying scarcity of the trans-Saharan migrants that should have been arriving by now.

Four furled nets down there, around some small artificial pools

We had six nets across this dry riverbed

Paella night

 

Migrants in South Africa ...

I have recently returned from a ringing and birding trip with four other UK based ringers Hugh Pulsford, Kevin Middleton, Emma Turnbull, Eugene and Linda Hood to South Africa. The trip was with Malcolm Wilson through his venture "African Affinity"
Malcolm has published a trip report on the African Affinity Blog.

In this piece I have put together some of the migratory species that we encountered, starting with the Steppe Buzzard. We caught and colour-ringed 12 of these as part of a larger multinational project involving fitting trackers in Israel too.

Actually one of the smaller species of the 23 species of raptors and owls we handled.

(photo Brendan Ryan, of a bird previously ringed)

This map shows the extensive movements of 1 Steppe Buzzard, unfortunately the tracking stops in the Cape where the bird was found dead. But shows the migration to the far border of  Kazakhstan and the return through the Arabian peninsular right through Africa to it's southern tip.

Map data taken from recent work by Ron Efrat

We captured 205 birds including 16 retraps of 87 species on the two week trip mainly based in the northern parts of South Africa with several days with the views of  Botswana or Zimbabwe in the distance. We set nets during the afternoons and opened them for dawn most mornings. We often lamped in the night - stories for another blog...

We captured Red-backed Shrikes and saw plenty of Lesser Grey Shrikes. The bird on the left was ringed in 2017 and a wintering site faithful bird.

An immature female Red-backed Shrike, perhaps less visible than the much more commonly seen males.

Though Palearctic migrants were thin on the ground we did catch this much sought after species.

Still moulting but we were happy with this Olive-tree Warbler. A difficult bird to find in South Africa, this bird being about the 30th ringed here.

The photo above is a screen shot of how SAFRING can present ringing data. The colours on the map show the density of captures, the graph shows numbers encountered per year and the table lists the ringers with totals. The screen shows the data for Olive-tree Warbler.

We caught a couple of Willow Warblers, both finishing their moult before the migration north.

A freshly moulted Icterine Warbler was surprisingly the only one we caught.

European Rollers are apparantly difficult to catch with only 16 having been ringed in South Africa.
After catching couple of resident Lilac-breasted Rollers in the spring trap, we got the hang of  trapping Euro Rollers -- we ringed 16 by the last day, doubling the South African ringing total !!

Raptor or Roller trapping took place during journeys between sites or during the heat of the day when too hot for mist netting. Malcolm in his African Affinity blog discusses our achievements with the bigger raptors including Snake and Hawk Eagles.

This small adult male Lanner Falcon was one of two we caught, we did also come across 1 Peregrine which would have been fascinating to be able to measure in hand and perhaps assign to the local race "minor"

We caught both Greater and Lesser Kestrels, this an immature moulting male Lesser.

This an adult male.

Smaller still this adult male Shikra, either a local breeder or a wanderer from elsewhere in Africa.

We often saw flocks of Amur Falcons and we did catch one in a roadside trap.
Towards the end of the trip we went to meet Rina Pretorius  who does much work with Amurs at a roost site.
Rina Pretorius has been part of a project  fitting transmitters to these Falcons showing their non stop flight over the Indian Ocean and far overland before stopping, examples of 5 days non-stop flying being recorded.

Some of the Amurs circling overhead pre roost. 10-15000 come into these tall trees on the edge of town to roost each night.

We caught a couple of birds in slightly windy conditions, here adult male and female Amur Falcons.

Have a look at the African Affinity blog, for a more complete report on our trip and of other recent trips to ring and bird with Malcolm Wilson in Africa.
We did record 296 bird species and many animal species.
(Photos a combination of trip participants or as labelled)

Keeping on top of things

Condidering that the Jackdaw population of St Dogmaels must be somewhere in the high hundreds, if not more, and that over the past five years or so I've been very restrained and only ringed 27 of them, I was quite suprised to see this pair when I looked out of the window this morning. (Photo not the best since there was double-glazing in the way).

Result!

We started ringing Linnets at Mwnt in April 2016, and had trapped 1240 birds without encountering any ringed elsewhere; until last week that is, when we met our first ringed bird that hadn't been ringed by us.  Considering that so few are ringed elsewhere in Wales each year, I had high hopes that this bird might support my suspicion that our substantial wintering population is almost entirely separate from our breeding population, and may come from somewhere further North than Beaumaris.

While waiting over the weekend, I did some concentrated number-crunching, and ended up with a plot comparing original ringing date with the number of days to our subsequent recapture of the same bird. I was very gratified to find that this plot, although a bit gappy for reasons outwith our control, entirely supports the impression I'd got: the breeding population disappears almost entirely in about mid-October, to be replaced by a wintering population that arrives at about the same time and itself disappears by about mid-April, while the breeding population has been re-appearing since about the end of March (and showing signs of having been somewhere hot enough to bleach their feathers).  I'll produce a refined and annotated version of this plot in due course.

Today we received details of our 'control', ringed as a juvenile at the beginning of August last year on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, 600km from Mwnt. This is a genuinely exciting moment in the project, and inspires us to go forward with increased effort, if that be possible.