Record year for Chough-upping in Cornwall!

Yesterday I had my annual trip down to the RSPB's Chough team in Cornwall to colour-ring the current year's crop of Chough chicks. So far we have managed to ring every single youngster known to have fledged in Cornwall since a pair returned to breed on the Lizard Peninsula over 10 years ago. The RSPB's annual monitoring of this population of known individuals is a fascinating study of the processes involved in a natural re-colonisation of a species following local extinction.

This year a record 16 chicks were colour-ringed at 4 nests. These comprised 6 males, 6 females and 4 that were too small to sex.

The original Lizard pair are still going but their's was the latest nest of the four ringed. At 11 days old the chicks were just big enough to colour-ring safely but were not big enough to determine their sex.

A new and challenging fifth site has yet to be accessed, as the female is still incubating, but this may prove to be the one that spoils our unbroken record!

Many thanks as usual to Claire Mucklow and Cat Leemar of RSPB South West and all the Cornish Chough volunteers for their assistance.

First day of the 2012 Chough campaign!

Spent yesterday with Adrienne Stratford checking on Chough nests in Meirionydd and Ceredigion. 2012 looks to have got off to a bit of an early start with some broods at least a week ahead of normal. 

Getting to the nests proves quite interesting at times but as can be seen we aren't completely cavalier about H&S and do wear hats on occasions!!

Two broods were colour-ringed during the day (probably the earliest we've ever ringed them) and another three broods weren't quite ready yet.

A cuppa break in a blackthorn-lined layby in Meirionydd yielded a couple of "extras" in terms of this cracking male Lesser Whitethroat,  3 Whitethroats and 2 Dunnocks!

Later in the evening a spot of lamping at Ynyslas with Jane produced 22 Dunlin, 2 Ringed Plovers and a Whimbrel and Gareth Richardson, a regular visiting ringer, down for a few days holiday had an additional 17 Dunlin. There was a heavy passage going on with hundreds of Dunlin and at least half a dozen Whimbrel present. Tonight's weather forecast is looking foul so dare say we'll be out again!!

Oh you little monkey!

'Monkey' the Cornish sat tagged woodcock continues to amaze with another 800 km notched up over recent days. He is now 5800 km from where he was tagged on Feb 18th.
This is amazing when compared to the other 10 tagged woodcock. As he is an adult, one assumes he knows exactly where he's going and that this is not just an aboration. One thought is that his normal wintering ground may have been somewhere further east than Cornwall, but was pushed that far west this winter due to the widespread cold weather throughout most of Europe in late January. At that time there were a lot of reports of huge numbers of woodcock arriving from the continent.

'Aderyn' and 'Rebecca' the two woodcock tagged by the Woodcock Network in Wales, have not moved for several weeks and it seems increasingly likely that they are now on their respective breeding grounds. 'Aderyn' is in Latvia and 'Rebecca' just west of Moscow.

See more at www.woodcockwatch.com

Bitey Haws and Woowas

Yesterday, in what might prove to be the last trip of the season, myself, Jane and Dave Smith spent most of the day at the Hawfinch feeding station. 16 Hawfinches were caught in total including 3 new birds and several 2011 retraps not previously recorded this year. Also managed to read a 2011 bird that we didn't catch. There have been several recent sightings of 3 different colour-ringed birds on a feeder in a Dolgellau garden too so colour-rings are proving useful.

Amazingly, we also managed to fluke two cracking male Wood Warblers in the finch nets. This has to be my warbler of choice, subtley beautiful!

Interesting to see how they perfectly match the newly emerging beech leaves. 

Also caught the first Great Spot of the year but no sign of last year's Lesser Spotted Woodpecker that annoyingly avoided capture on multiple occasions!

All in all, the old fingers took a bit of a hammering yesterday!

OMG OMSK!

One of the 12 woodcock satellite tagged in the UK this winter has now flown nearly 5000km to Omsk in Russia.

Rebecca and Aderyn the two Welsh wintering woodcock that were tagged by the Woodcock Network have not been so energetic. Rebecca has moved south of her last location in Russia but is still west of Moscow. Aderyn is still in Latvia and although not giving high quality data is still giving some indicating that he is alive and well. The batteries on his tag may be low due to dense undergrowth preventing daytime recharging through the solar array.

The best data has been coming from the two Norwegian birds that were tagged in Scotland, this may be down to the vegetation in Norway being more sparse thus allowing better recharging conditions.
Looking deep into Russia at Monkey's location on Google Earth has me slightly worried that he might have landed somewhere that we are not supposed to be looking at and there may soon be a knock on my door from three burly men that don't share my fascination about woodcock migration!

See more about woodcock on www.woodcockwatch.com

Rockit Science!

Spent the day monitoring Chough nests in Ceredigion with Jane. The good news was that two former sites had been re-occupied by new pairs. All four adults were colour-ringed and the female at one of the sites had travelled over 60 kms from her natal site on the Lleyn Peninsular.

Bonus of the day was a brood of Rock Pipits. Luckily I happened to have a big ladder on me so we were able (just!) to reach the nest and ring the young. The beauty of the British Ringing scheme is that such chance encounters, and odd broods ringed here and there, all add to the National Database helping scientists at the Nunnery to investigate the movements, survival rates and population dynamics of a wide range of species that may not be possible through individual studies.

 Perfect sized Rock Pipit pulli

Back in the well-hidden nest

Hen's teeth

Had a day flogging around a very cold and windswept Mid-Wales doing bird surveys on and around a proposed wind-farm site. Find of the day (actually, could well be find of the month!) was a field with three pairs of Lapwings and a pair of Curlews. I honestly can't remember the last time I found a Lapwing nest in Mid-Wales. Will be going back in a couple of weeks time when hopefully they will have transformed into a more ringer-friendly format (hatched!).  This nest was only about 30 yards from a Raven nest overflowing with large young so not counting my chickens but the sight of 6 Lapwings and 2 Curlews kicking the crap out of any passing Raven was enough to raise the hopes a bit.

New arrivals

Saw my first young Choughs of the year today at the only remaining inland site in Mid-Wales. I am particularly glad to see them hatch this year as the site made an unwelcome appearance, by name, on a local bird blog recently and I feared the worst. I ringed my first Choughs at this site back in 1987 and have ringed broods here nearly every year since as part of the Cross & Stratford Welsh Chough Project.  Makes you more than a bit protective! Hopefully I'll be able to post an update in about three weeks time when this year's young get their own individual colour combinations.

Not the best of photos but 2 seconds after I took this I fell off the wall!!

Welsh woodcock arrives in Russia

The latest on the 12 satellite tagged Woodcock is that three are now in Russia, including Rebecca tagged by myself and Tony Cross at the Crychan.

Having spent several weeks in east Poland she is now about 150 km west of Moscow near a town called Rzhev. As Woodcock are largely nocturnal and spend their days resting in dark areas of cover, the batteries on the tags are not getting a good charge from the solar array.

Although we are getting poor location signals when birds are resting up, when they migrate we get good fixes. Its interesting to note that the two birds in Norway are giving a better signal, probably due to birch and alder not coming into leaf yet that far north. Andrew Hoodless has only been posting the best location data on the www.woodcockwatch.com website map,  but further analysis of the poorer grade data might still reveal more relavent information on migration.

Aderyn, the other Welsh tagged woodock is still in Poland, but may well move on soon. Our contacts in St Petersburg tell us that the snow has yet to clear there and that their first roding Woodcock was only seen just over a week ago.

Whimbrel colour-ringing

Last night Jane and I had a trip to the coast south of Aberystwyth in search of Whimbrel. It is still a bit early in the season yet, with birds only recently recorded moving through, but we did manage to catch 4 out of 4 so no complaints!

We have colour-ringed over 80 Whimbrel now since spring 2010 but apart from one seen by Marc Hughes a few kilometres inland of where it was ringed there have been a very disappointing number of re-sightings so far. Any Icelandic or Gambian birders reading this, come on - pull your fingers out!!