They're back...

Over the last week, Madalina and I had been heading out on to the hills in Mid Wales to check if any Woodcock had made their way back some of our ringing sites, where they spend the winter. Although the majority of them arrive from mid November onwards, there always seem to be a few that appear in the second half of October (makes you wonder if these first ones are UK birds, or from across the sea).

On Saturday night I saw my first two Woodcock of the season, but frustratingly they were a bit jumpy and I annoyingly missed catching both of them! Last night, in much better conditions (strong winds), Madalina and I headed out again. We only saw one Woodcock during the seven or so hours that we were out, but this one was a lot less jumpy and the net was soon dropped over it.

As always seems to be the case with the first ones that arrive, this bird was a juvenile. Throughout the season, there are always a few Woodcock that are a little trickier to age than others, but this one had very nice obvious tips to the primary coverts (juveniles have nice rounded primary coverts with the tips the same colour as the rest of the pattern on the feather, whereas adults have flattened ends to the primary coverts with a pale tip).

As well as Woodcock, we are also trapping and ringing the other birds that are using these sites. By the end of the night, we possibly had one of the best catches we'd had in a long time, with totals of: 8 Snipe, 7(1) Jack Snipe, 7(1) Golden Plover, 1 Meadow Pipit, 1 Fieldfare and 2 Skylark (we also rescued and ringed a Mallard from the middle of the road on the way home).

Tracking Wood Lane’s wandering Curlews

Many years ago in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was a trainee bird ringer, I used to visit Wood Lane sand quarry to ring Sand Martins with my trainer Chris Whittles. Chris was also very keen on Curlews which we used to ring at the old Allscott Sugar Beet Factory near Telford. In those days there may have been upwards of 200 Curlew roosting on the lagoons in the autumn and we would occasionally catch birds that were older than I was at the time which was pretty mind-blowing.

In 2000-2003, following discussions with John Hawkins the warden, I returned to Wood Lane to ring Sand Martins but also to mist-net Curlew and other passage waders on the settling pools, including the newly designated Shropshire Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve.  At that time the Curlew roost at Wood Lane numbered well over 50 birds on occasions and, over the course of four years, I ringed a total of 56 individuals. These birds were fitted solely with BTO metal rings and as a result few recoveries/sightings resulted.

 

Moving forward a few years. In August 2024 by kind agreement of Tudor Griffiths (the owners), Shropshire Wildlife Trust (the site managers) and John Hawkins I was once again granted permission to catch Curlews on the reserve. I had sought permission as I wanted to try and catch some of the birds to fit GPS trackers that had been funded by Natural Resources Wales for attachment to Curlew breeding on Whixall Moss. These GPS tags, costing about £1,000 each, are game-changing in making it possible to track the movements of individual birds in great detail. Despite much effort I had only managed to fit two tags to birds at Whixall in 2023 and one more in 2024.  The breeding birds at Whixall nest in such close proximity that their territorial behaviour is switched off somewhat and they are far less aggressive to other Curlews in their territory making our usual trapping technique (involving a sound lure and decoy) somewhat ineffective.

 

The GPS tag data showed that the tagged birds nesting on Whixall moved to Wood Lane after the breeding season so it was assumed that most of the birds at Wood Lane in the autumn were likely to be Whixall breeders too.

 

On the evening of 14^th August 2023 Adrienne Stratford and I set mist nets across the pool in front of the hide and waited. Just before dusk a flock of 24 Curlew approached the pool, circled overhead but had clearly seen the nets and headed-off again. Like most waders Curlews have excellent eyesight and are unlikely to fly into a net during daylight hours, we would have to wait and hope they returned after dark. 

  

 

A few hours later, after a brief but busy session, we had caught 14 of the 24 birds. One of the birds already had colour-rings and a GPS tag fitted and was confirmed as a breeding male from Whixall Moss caught in April 2023. Two other birds already had BTO rings only. One was one of the 56 BTO metal-only ringed birds originally caught by me at Wood Lane 23 years earlier and the other had been ringed there by Shropshire Ringing Group in 2009. Both these birds, plus 11 others, were fitted with colour-rings and 3 were also fitted with Lotek Cellular GPS trackers that work via the 2G mobile network.

 Curlew with Lotek Cellular GPS tracker fitted

It might reasonably be assumed that birds congregating in a flock to moult at one location might all be birds from the local breeding population and show similar winter dispersal patterns following completion of their annual moult?  How wrong can you be!

 

The birds caught and tagged that night showed very different movements subsequently.

One bird, Yellow 6N, moved to Isombridge near Telford on 24^th November 2023. He spent the rest of the winter there before moving, on 12^th March 2024, to presumed breeding grounds near Bewdley then, post-breeding he moved on to Worcestershire Wildlife Trust’s Upton Warren reserve for a stay before returning to Wood Lane on the night of 11^th/12^th August 2024.

  

Another bird, Yellow 6J, moved from Wood Lane direct to the Dyfi Estuary near Ynyshir on 3^rd September 2023 where she spent the whole winter returning to the flood plains of the River Dee near Wrexham on 19^thFebruary 2024 where she stayed until 8^th March 2024 when worryingly all contact was lost.  It was subsequently discovered she was alive and well but her tag had failed. 

 

 

Photo ©John Harding

 

The final one of the three Curlew tagged at Wood Lane in August 2023, Yellow 6H, made a sudden over-night movement to near Limerick on 4^th September 2023 where she spent the rest of the winter before travelling back to a presumed breeding location near Allenheads in the North Pennines on the night of 28^th/ 29^thFebruary 2024. She returned to Wood Lane via Barnard Castle (got her eyes tested?), Shap, Morecambe Bay and Blackpool on 1^st July 2024. Shortly after, on 6^th August, her tag came off and I managed to recover it with the help of the farmer whose land the birds had been feeding on. This tag was redeployed on a female caught at Wood Lane on 23^rd Sept 2024 (see below for details).

 

        Photo ©John Harding

 

 

In autumn 2024 at least 13 of the 14 birds caught the preceding year were photographed back on the Reserve Pool by John Harding confirming the well-known fact that adult Curlews are long-lived with an annual adult survival rate in excess of 90%

 

Following a repeat request we were granted permission for another catching attempt and on 23^rd September 2024, Adrienne Stratford, Jack Slattery and I once again set nets across the pool and waited for darkness to fall. On this occasion, a bit later in the year than the 2023 attempt, just 14 birds turned up at dusk and we managed to catch five of them. One was the same tagged male we caught in 2023 but the GPS tag had since stopped working so we removed it.  One was another one of the 56 BTO-only birds ringed by me at Wood Lane 22 years earlier and the other 3 were unringed. These three, along with the old re-trap, were fitted with colour-rings and one, Yellow 7L, was also fitted with the GPS tracker recovered from 6H.

 

Yellow 7L, stayed very local to Wood Lane feeding either in the main sand pit or on fields near Crosemere until early January when, presumably in response to the prolonged cold spell, she made a sudden over-night movement to Belgooly, Cork on 8^th/9^th January 2025. We have our fingers crossed that she may return as a Whixall breeding bird in February or March.

 

 

Interestingly Yellow 6N from 2023 returned to Upton Warren in Mid-December rather than spending time at Isombridge as he did last winter.

 

                            Yellow 6N at Upton Warren          Photo © Clive Appleby

As fascinating as these movements are it is also important to identify the resources, in terms of water bodies for roosting, locations for nesting and fields for foraging that these birds are utilising on a regular basis so that conservation initiatives might be correctly deployed to the most important areas. The map below shows the locations Yellow 6H was using during July 2024. It can be seen that besides Wood Lane, where she was roosting and resting, she was only actually visiting a small number of fields for foraging. It should also be noted that at this time 6H was one of a regular flock of ca. 22 birds, all presumable utilising the same resources.

Colour-ringing has shown that adult survival rates in Curlew are high but research during the breeding season in many areas of the country has highlighted the dire state of the recruitment of young birds. Few local Curlew populations are currently able to rear sufficient young to replace even low levels of adult mortality.  GPS-tagging can supply large amounts of data on habitat usage throughout the year. The more we know the better able we are to make informed decisions about targeting limited finances. In an area where old pastures are constantly being ‘improved’, ploughed, re-seeded or planted with maize having detailed maps of favoured feeding areas could help to best preserve those areas that are vital to the continued survival of the adult population. Curlew populations everywhere have a difficult future and virtually no-one who works on Curlews is very optimistic about their prospects but if adult mortality increases due to continued habitat deterioration the demise of lowland Curlews will be considerably hastened. Turning back the clock on agricultural development is impossible, as is stemming the tide of future ‘improvement’ but protecting a few key breeding and foraging sites is more achievable and could make a huge difference.

 

                          

Fortunate Photos Facilitate Following Falcons' Fortunes

Working so closely with the Welsh Kite Trust it is inevitable that MWRG focuses heavily on the study of birds of prey  - particularly falcons as they seem to be fairing less favourably than their fork-tailed cousins. The group have installed and monitor well over 50 Kestrel nest boxes with some success and an indication that the safer nest sites are resulting in increased nest success and greater productivity. Every year we colour-ring a sample of local Peregrine, Kestrel and Hobby nests and have been working on Merlins too although the state of this species in Mid-Wales is so dire now that we rarely get chance to colour-ring any. The last nest we ringed, in 2022, was sadly predated by a fox a week after we ringed them and we were unjustly held accountable by some. The colour-ringing has greatly increased the information gathered on the survival and dispersal of the young but reporting rates are still low. Recently we received a trio of photographs that helped in the data gathering.

Firstly a Peregrine photographed by stunned bird-watchers on a pelagic trip off Newquay, Ceredigion as it caught and carried off the first Wilson's Petrel ever recorded in the County was clearly seen to be wearing an Orange ring VSH. This bird had been ringed as a chick (male) at an inland nest site in South Shropshire the previous year. We have recently had Peregrines from our area recovered or sighted in Carnarfonshire, Cheshire, Buckinghamshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Lothian. 

NB. For Ceredigion birders missing out on a lifer and seeking revenge please note that the bird's DNA profile is held in the Nation Wildlife Crime Database as it was sampled, along with all the other Peregrine chicks we ring to aid any subsequent investigations into illegally acquired or killed birds.

Secondly a Hobby ringed as a chick in a nest near Newtown was caught on a camera-trap at RSPB's lake Vyrnwy Reserve on 26th July 2023 (thanks to Sam Sharpe for reporting).

Finally, a young Kestrel, ringed in a nestbox just south of Aberystwyth in June this year was photographed by local bird and wildlife enthusiast Shane Jones on 28th August. It had only travelled a few miles down the coast but still great to record that it was alive and doing well. We have previously had colour-ringed Kestrels reported from North Scotland, France and Spain so they don't all stay at home. Many thanks to Shane for allowing us to use his excellent photo.

Costly menu!

Yesterday Adrienne Stratford, Jack Slattery and I replaced or installed a couple of new Chough nest-boxes in North Ceredigion. The first site, between Borth and Aberystwyth, which was used successfully in 2022 (rearing a brood of 4 chicks) was considerably the worse for wear with the top completely collapsed in. Not surprising though as I originally installed this with Mick Green back in the early 1990s! If it lasts anywhere near as long as the first one it certainly won't be me replacing it next time!

Unfortunately the local Peregrines have expensive tastes. No starlings or pigeons for them - Chough, Woodcock and Golden Plover seemed to be on the menu sadly - almost considered it personal!  Annoyingly, whilst leaving enough evidence of the wildlife crime they had perpetrated the Peregrines removed any evidence of whom the victims might have been (no legs/no rings). Hopefully the unfortunate Chough concerned was a yearling and not one of the breeding pair 🤞

Chough nestbox installed at a new site near Aberystwyth where a pair had attempted to breed, unsuccessfully, in 2022. Hopefully the addition of a much more secure and sheltered nest location will ensure success in 2023 and beyond.

Danish Nightjar details

I have just received the original ringing details of the Danish-ringed Nightjar that I controlled in North Wales. It was ringed as a juvenile on 21st August 2021 at Glæde, Thisted, Viborg, Denmark.

Given the age at ringing and the date of ringing there is still some uncertainty about the provenance of this individual. In many species of bird juveniles often make exploratory movements away from their natal area before heading south on migration. This bird could have been a bird reared in Denmark that has subsequently nested in Wales or perhaps more likely it could also have been a British-bred bird that dispersed north (or even got blown north whilst on migration) before correcting itself and heading south to its winter quarters.

Normally we would be left not knowing which scenario was correct but in this instance we may have an ace in the hole that could give us more clarity. Over that past few seasons, as assistance to George Day (a PhD student at York University working on European Nightjar breeding systems) I have DNA sampled a large proportion of the birds breeding and reared on the wind farm monitoring site at Clocaenog. I also managed to collect a shed feather from the Danish-ringed bird. It may therefore be possible to compare the DNA profiles and see how likely it is that the bird was from the local Welsh population or whether it was sufficiently different to imply a more distant origin.

Male Nightjar on day roost

A nocturnal surprise!

When I was a newly qualified 'C' ringer living in Shropshire in 1980  I dreamed of catching a Nightjar. One night, at a local forestry plantation near Pontesbury I even, unexpectedly, had one flying around the nets we had set for general warbler netting. Despite placing a white birdbag in the bottom shelf of every net and even tying moths into the mesh we didn't catch it and it was clearly just passing through as it was never seen again. It was however a very notable sighting for Shropshire at the time. Fast forward 42 years and part of my work is now on Nightjar surveying for wind farm developments. Despite having personally ringed a total of 619 Nightjars (nearly all in Wales) and also retrapped at least 265 individuals I still get a massive buzz every time I catch one. That adrenalin rush was however amplified to an unbelievable level the other night when I extracted a ringed Nightjar from the net and realised immediately that the ring wasn't a BTO ring!

After an agonising search of the car for my glasses I read the word DENMARK! WHAT!!! A Danish-ringed Nightjar (or should that be Natravnen?) clearly breeding in a forestry plantation in North Wales! What on earth is going on there? I now have an equally agonising wait to hear where and when this bird was ringed. Was it ringed on autumn passage so possibly a lost UK bred bird? Was it ringed as a chick? Or was it possibly even ringed by Danish ringers on an expedition to Africa? At least things are a bit quicker these days, when I used to ring Starlings as a student in Aberystwyth we sometimes had to wait five years or more to get the original ringing details back from behind the Iron Curtain! I will of course share the results of this amazing capture as soon as I get them. This is only the fourth foreign-ringed Nightjar ever recovered in Great Britain and the first recorded movement between Denmark and GB. Who says we don't have anything left to discover through traditional ringing methods?

 

European Curlew Connections

Well we might have ill-advisedly severed our close connections to Europe but our Curlews seem not to have done the same.

Three recent sightings have highlighted, once again, the vital need for cross-border conservation initiatives when dealing with species such as the Curlew. It is well-known that our breeding population is supplemented each winter by large numbers of birds seeking refuge from colder climes in Scandinavia, Poland, Germany, Russia and elsewhere in Northern Europe. It is less well known that, whilst most just move to southern Britain or Ireland for the winter, some of our breeding birds also move to warmer countries a bit further south. 

Yellow FW, a bird that regularly winters at Petit Port, Jersey has now returned for the 5th winter in succession.Yellow ZB a breeding male from the Shropshire part of the Curlew Country area was reported in Northern France in July (see earlier post Curlew là là) and now Yellow XC, an adult female ringed at a newly created wader scrape in the Curlew Country area, has been photographed near Santander - no not the one in Welshpool High Street, the one in Northern Spain! According to the BTOs current Online Ringing and Recovery Reports BTO online-ringing-reports this is only the fifth reported record of a British-ringed Curlew in Spain.

Curlew XC photographed by Ernesto Villodas on the Santoña marshes in Northern Spain

Pushing boundaries

Since the formation of the Mid Wales Ringing Group (and the start of the Dunlin colour-ringing project) in 2016 we have individually colour-marked over 6,000 Dunlin. The colour-marking has massively improved the recovery rate of our marked Dunlin and so far we have had over 450 sightings from a wide geographical area. Two recent sightings though have greatly extended the boundary of the area that Ynyslas Dunlin are know to either come from or go to. Olivier Gilg recently informed us of the sighting of LP0, a Dunlin ringed by Paul and Silvia on 23rd August 2020, seen on territory in NE Greenland (where it was being attacked by a breeding Sabine's Gull!).  

 

Ynyslas Dunlin on breeding ground in NE Greenland image © M.-A. Forin-Wiart/GREA

We also recently heard from Arnold Kristjuhan informing us of a sighting of NH5 (a bird ringed by me on 18th October 2020 in front of the Pillbox on the Dyfi salt marsh whilst trying to catch Curlews for the ECHOES project echoesproj.eu) at Tareste, Hiiumaa, Estonia. These two records greatly extend the northern and eastern limits for our Dunlin recoveries so far. The furthest south an Ynyslas Dunlin has so far been recorded is at Pirang Shrimp Farm in the Gambia.

Of the 450+ sightings submitted so far, foreign movements of Dunlin to or from Ynyslas have included Greenland (3), Iceland (4), Faero Islands (1), Norway (3), Sweden (5), Finland (2), Estonia (1), Denmark (4), Germany (4), Poland (2), Republic of Ireland (23), The Netherlands (5), France (30), Switzerland (1), Spain (62), Portugal (15), Canary Islands (2), Morocco (2), Mauritania (124), Senegal (1) and The Gambia (1)

 (NB these totals may contain more than one sighting of the same individual)

So next time you see a flock of Dunlin, and rapidly ignore them in search of something more exciting, take a moment to think that in the summer some of those birds may have spent their time dodging Sabine's Gulls, Arctic foxes and even Polar Bears and may be heading off to spend the winter dodging Black Kites, Jackals and Crocodiles, it's amazing really that there are still so many of them!

New Colour-ring Reporter App

 

Thanks to the IT skills of Stephen Vickers we now have an automated colour-ring reporter app. If you click the link on the top right of the website you will see the above screen and there you can input your sightings of any of our colour-ringed birds. The app will then generate an immediate output detailing the ringing information and any subsequent re-sightings. I hope you like this exciting new development and that this may encourage a few more birders to submit their colour-ring sightings directly (in return for instant gratification!).

Where do you think you're going?

                                                        Photo by Alex Jamieson

An email popped into my inbox today with details of a sighting of a young Kestrel, ringed earlier this year in one of Red Liford's nest boxes near Lledrod in Ceredigion. Given the location and the distance of the sighting I was a bit sceptical that the report was correct but, if it was, wanted to post something on the blog. I sent the finder an email to see if they had any photos of the bird and thankfully, not only did they have photos but several (not posted here) confirmed, without any doubt, that the bird in question was one that we had ringed and was not one from another scheme with similar rings. It was photographed (looking very sorry for itself) in heavy rain on Rattray Lighthouse in Aberdeenshire, just over 600km NNE of where it had hatched!

We get disappointingly few records of our ringed Kestrels but since colour-ringing started we have had recoveries from West Yorkshire, Cheshire, Shropshire, Gloucester, Wiltshire, Suffolk and even Spain. This current movement to North Scotland is totally unexpected and unprecedented. 

I really hope the bird in question survives and in a way I hope it doesn't attempt the return journey, at least not until we get some better weather next year.

Curlew chick releases

For the past few years I have been working for Curlew Country on the Shropshire/Powys border trying to help maintain the small, remnant, lowland Curlew population there. In the initial years our attention was spent trying to collect information on what exactly were the problems and how we might alleviate them. Quite rapidly it became apparent that the problems were major and that drastic action was needed. In 2017 we pioneered Curlew headstarting, taking eggs from nests with low probability of success, and rearing chicks in captivity to the point of fledge and then releasing into suitable natural habitat. This year, after an enforced break in 2020 due to Covid, we released another 33 young Curlews, making a total of nearly 100 since we began. The link below shows some moving images of the release of the second batch of chicks in 2021 

https://youtu.be/yyVThb73KL4 

Hopefully some of these birds will return to breed and help keep the iconic bubbling song of the curlew a feature of the Welsh Marches. Please keep yours eyes peeled for colour-rings on any Curlew you may see anywhere and report, it may even be one of those shown in this video!

First and Fortunate 2

Over the last 20 odd years records of Hobby in summer have increased in Ceredigion. Tregaron Bog and Borth Bog have been favoured sites as the birds hunt the plentiful supplies of dragonflies. More random sightings in farmland have hinted at breeding birds becoming established and breeding was confirmed for the first time in the county just a few years ago. 

A couple of days back, I was contacted by a friend and ex 'C' ringer of mine to say he had a pair of Hobby nesting not far from his house and did I have a schedule 1 licence to ring them? Well, fortunately, I do, so yesterday, having obtained the landowner's permission Silvia and I went over to check the nest and see if it was safely accessible. 

The birds were breeding about 30ft up in an old Carrion Crow's nest in a hedgerow oak, still well within my rapidly diminishing capabilities!  A few throws of the rope and 10 minutes later the chicks were safely on the ground but for one of them the visit was quite literally life-saving. The younger male chick had managed to get his leg badly entangled in the veritable spider's web of baler twine that the crow's had brought in as nest lining. 

His foot was quite swollen and the leg itself a bit 'pinched' but once the twine had been cut away it rapidly improved with the swelling disappearing almost instantly and the foot becoming a bit more normal in colour. 

Without our intervention this chick would have died a slow and miserable death as the adults would eventually have been forced to abandon it and it would have starved, unable to leave the nest. As it is it appears that being restricted in movement has led to him developing less quickly than his female brood-mate.

As far as I am aware these are the first two Hobby pulli ever ringed in Ceredigion and they may be only the second and third Hobby ever ringed in the county. We were fortunate enough to catch one "accidentally" on Both Bog a few years ago as it pursued a Cuckoo across the reedbed.

Both chicks were colour-ringed so we look forward to receiving sightings of them in the future, hopefully settling locally and expanding our breeding population of this stunning little falcon.

Curlew là là

 

On 10th July 2021 Pierre Leon photographed Curlew Yellow ZB on the shore of Plage du Vogue, Guisseny,  France. This bird was caught and ringed in the breeding season at one of the Curlew Country breeding territories using a whoosh net and decoy. This is highly significant as it provides yet more confirmation that some of our breeding Curlews winter in, or pass through, France, where, until recently Curlew was still a legal quarry species and where as recently as 2019 there was an intention to set a 'sustainable' harvest limit of 6,000 birds! Thankfully, due to widespread international outcry, the decision was amended and the bag limit was set to zero for the 2019/2020 hunting season. Hopefully, international pressure will continue and those birds from our rapidly declining breeding population that choose to move to France for the winter can do so in relative safety.

Yellow ZB either wintering or staging at Guisseny in northern France in mid-July just over 450 kms from Shropshire where he had attempted (and presumably failed) to breed.

We're Knot flagging!

Last year we started two new colour-ringed projects putting leg-flags on Knot and Turnstone. The Turnstone ringing has yet to yield many resightings but the Knot flagging is already proving very rewarding. Here is an update of re-sightings so far.

The Knot flagging project is being done in collaboration with Jim Wilson of the International Wader Study Group and Peter Knight and Rose Maciewicz of Leeds University. Since the scheme began, a total of 70 Knot have been leg-flagged at Ynyslas and, of these, 14 have been re-sighted away from Ynyslas, several on multiple occasions. This is a huge improvement on the results obtained by BTO metal ringing alone where we have previously had just two recoveries from over 350 knot ringed.

To date most of the recoveries have come from the UK but have also included birds re-sighted in Ireland, France, Belgium and Portugal. 

Knot re-sightings 20/21. Click on individual icon to see details

The Portuguese re-sighting is very significant as its location would indicate that the bird was of the race Calidris canutus canutus from Siberia which winters in West Africa. This race has very few (if any) confirmed records for Wales (although it must surely be present quite frequently on autumn passage?).

Ynyslas leg-flagged Knot (race canutus?) in Portugal. Unfortunately the individual could not be identified as it was not close enough to read the inscription on the flag.

A Great Spot (for Woodpeckers)

Posts on the blog have tailed off a bit in recent years as most of what we do is part of long-term projects, so can become a bit repetitive! Anyway, life has really changed now and anything we manage to do is a complete breath of fresh air (often literally!).

 
One thing I, like many other ringers, have been managing to do in lock-down, in line with guidance from BTO HQ, is ring in the garden. Normally I confine this to when the Siskins, Goldfinches and Redpolls are passing through on spring passage as I'm not massively keen on catching shed loads of local Blue Tits. This year though, bring on the Blue Tits! 

There has been a surprising result to the increased garden netting in that, amazingly, this morning I managed to catch the 30th different Great Spotted Woodpecker on my garden feeders since April 2020 - where on earth are they all coming from?

Sadly, the really old one I caught just over 12 months ago, that was just a few months shy of the current British longevity record for the species, hasn't been one of them.

There are some nights when woodcock ringing is just hard work. Last night aided by Bethyn Thomas and his Dad we saw 38 woodcock, but I could only catch 3. This was because it was very calm and the ground was frosty making a stealthy approach impossible. However there was a reward for our effort and kms walked, one of the three birds caught was a retrap of a woodcock I caught as a juvenile on the very same field eight years ago. This is my oldest retrap to date after catching 2400 woodcock over 12 years. This bird has made 17 migrations across of the North Sea. With an average migration of around 2000 km this individual has probably flown around 35,000 km in its life. I retrapped this bird in the autumn of 2012 and again in Jan 2014, but have not encountered it since. At time like this I dream how amazing it would be if woodcock could talk.

Egrets return

I have recently received reports (and photographs) of two of our colour-ringed Little Egrets. Both birds were ringed on the same day (25th June 2012) over 8 years ago. The first (White T, Yellow A) photographed on Anglesey by Toby Carter has been reported about 10 times over the years all from Malltraeth Marsh at a maximum distance from the ringing site near Bangor of 19.5 kms. 

Photo © Toby Carter

The second bird (White T, Yellow V) photographed at Llansteffan, Carmarthenshire by Mark Carter has only been reported twice previously but amazingly both time were at Playa Blanca, Lanzarote, Canary Islands. The first report was on 8th January 2014 and then again on 15th March 2020. At 2,824 kms, this is one of the longest movements ever recorded for a BTO-ringed Little Egret and mirrors an earlier movement of one of our Bangor-ringed birds to Tenerife. It would be amazing to know if this second bird has been making annual migrations down to the same wintering location on the Canaries (a round trip of over 5,000kms) or whether it suddenly decided to return after 8 years living the ex pat life (which seems highly unlikely!).

Photo © Mark Carter

Ringing location of both birds shown by green marker. The top red marker shows the location of all of (White T, Yellow A)'s reported sightings and the bottom two red markers show those of (White T, Yellow V)

Sweet SA

Last night was the first of the next set of high tides for ringing at Ynyslas. As the winds were light and conditions were right I decided to forgo wader dazzling in favour of mist-netting terns. On the last set of tides the estuary was brim-full of Sandwich Terns, Kittiwakes and a raft of other species but the winds were far too high to attempt any netting and unfortunately terns aren't really catchable by dazzling. Sod's law, conditions were now perfect but it was ominously quite on the tern front with nearly all having moved on! Still an opportunity to net terns is never missed even if there isn't much about. With assistance from Stephen Edwards and Gareth and Roy Richardson we set the usual 4 x 60ft wader nets on the point and waited. High tide was a bit early, such that there was no catching on the rising tide as it was too light and the nets were too visible. It did allow us to watch a juvenile Peregrine persistently terrorising the Dunlin (and seemingly inflicting needless damage as we caught four Dunlin with large rips in the skin of their breasts or sides). 

Needless to say I was relieved when we eventually caught our first few terns (Sandwich and Common) along with a few Dunlin, Knot and a Turnstone. The Knot and Turnstone were particularly welcome as it enabled us to kick-start two new colour-marking projects using leg-flags on both species. 

We catch a reasonable number of both species annually but in the past have had very few returns from just BTO metal rings. Hopefully the leg-flags will enable birdwatchers to help us collect additional information and greatly increase the data on movements etc.

Just as we were finishing processing the last few birds Stephen returns from a net round with the exciting news of a foreign-ringed Common Tern. "Wow, that's nice" I say. The reply was "yes, and its a South African ring!" 

My reply is, not surprising to some, unrepeatable!!

We can CU

People call them "unprecedented times", I cannot possibly say what I call them!!

This year's planned Curlew work, along with so much else, has been shelved, just a small piece of the resulting worldwide data gap in long-term monitoring projects that we will never fill. It is, admittedly, a much smaller sacrifice than some have made and was necessary to help save lives but is a real and present pain in the proverbial all the same.

One small saving grace, for us anyway, is that whilst maintaining all rules on social distancing and not putting anyone at increased risk we have just managed to install Curlew Cam on another nest so that people bored with playing Fortnite or watching old re-runs of TV shows that weren't that great first time round can now fill their waking hours watching a Curlew sat motionless on a nest hoping to catch the once every few hours change-over!

Female curlew on Curlew Country's Curlew Cam 2020

This year's camera is on a nest where both adults have previous.

The male (YELLOW BI) was ringed at Dolydd Hafren on 6th August 2015. Unusually he is known to have nested for two years at a nearby territory (about 2km distant) before moving to the current territory near Church Stoke, Powys, where this is his third nesting attempt in three years (all these last three nests were fenced by Curlew Country and all produced hatched chicks. We cannot be 100% sure but we think at least one or two of the resulting chicks fledged successfully). This male is a bit of an A-lister in the Curlew world having starred in an award-winning film by Billy Clapham called Keeper of the Call and appeared on Springwatch in 2019. He is known to winter at Devoran in Cornwall where Mark Grantham has reported seeing him every winter since he was ringed.

Male bird on his winter retreat to Cornwall (photo courtesy of Mark Grantham)

The female (YELLOW ID) was also ringed at Dolydd Hafren on 27th March 2017. She is also known to have nested at another territory (some 10km distant) but is not known to have successfully hatched or reared young. She is a new pairing for this male who nested with an unringed bird last year. We do not know where she winters - yet!

The link for the live video feed will be available for the duration of the incubation and can be viewed on Curlew Country's website at

 Curlew Country Curlew Cam 2020

Hopefully things will have eased by the end of the breeding season otherwise the male might not be allowed back to Cornwall this winter!