After spending 11 weeks in Romania seeing and ringing some great species of bird, I can happily say that I'm pleased to be back home. The winds have been quite calm, which has allowed Silvia and myself to get out and do some mist netting at a couple of our regular sites. The first site we tried was a pine forest where we've had good catches of small passerines during late summer/early autumn in previous years. The forest was very quite and we only managed 30 or so birds. The next few days we tried some mixed willow scrub/conifer re-growth. This was definitely where all of the birds were hanging out. Over the space of 3 days and only about 10 hours netting we managed to trap and ring over 220 birds. Highlights over the 4 days netting were easily Firecrest and Redstart.
Firecrest (hopefully not the only one for this year!)
Redstart
Total number of birds netted in the 4 days!
As well as netting we've also headed out on to the hills dazzling, to see what birds are 'in'. Despite (understandably) very few birds, we've still managed to catch 7 Common Snipe, 6(+1) Skylark, 1 Meadow Pipit and 2 Tawny Owl. Not bad for mid September, roll on the autumn!
Tawny Owl
...and good to have you back! Not a moment too soon either, those Great Snipe should be passing through Radnorshire (otherwise unrecorded) pretty soon!
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