Last night after struggling with weeks of far from ideal Nightjarring weather the heat was finally turned up and what a difference it made. Lucky mascot Dan Carrington (who has not yet been on an unsuccessful Nightjar session) and I caught an amazing SEVEN different adult birds comprising 6 males and a female. We also checked on a nest with a point of fledge chick that will hopefully get ringed later today by Mike Shewring. Five of the birds were fitted with radio-tags for subsequent tracking and they were also mouth-swabbed as part of a BTO investigation into Nightjar DNA. As you can see there's not much difficulty in persuading a Nightjar to open its mouth for swabbing.
The only downside to the whole evening was that I somehow managed to let go of the first male we caught just after taking him out of the net so he didn't get ringed! That is the first and last time that's going to happen and a bloody good job it wasn't a trainee that did it.......!!
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