Thursday 26 January 2012

Pulling the Older Birds


Having returned from a fabulous trip to New Zealand I was keen to get out on my woodcock site near Llanilar to find out how numbers had changed over the past three weeks.

On the night of Jan 24th I set out across horribly soggy fields reminding me that unlike down under we were still very much in the midst of winter. The woodcock were very jumpy but I did manage to catch 6, amazingly all were re-traps. Have I reached saturation level?

Four were retraps of birds caught earlier in the winter. However EP94241 was originally ringed by me on the site on 18/2/09 and EW93452 on 11/11/09 both were on the same fields I first caught them. As the years go by we are learning that there seems to be a high level of wintering site fidelity in woodcock.

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