Just how many swallows does it take?

June is always our busiest month for ringing nestlings, and this year has been no exception as can be judged from the lack of blogging!! Actually for the last month I have not only been trying to be both diurnal and nocturnal but amphibious as well! Despite the abundant presence of Swallows locally summer has yet to arrive and waterproofs and thermals are still the order of the day!!

The month started well with helping to catch Cuckoos for the BTO satellite tracking project and finishing off colour-ringing the last few Chough broods in North Wales. Pied Flycatcher nestlings then became priority for a brief while before wing-tagging Red Kite chicks and radio-tagging Nightjars took over. Throw in a few Little Egrets, some Barn Owl and Kestrel broods ringed and some largely abortive searches for successful Merlin and Peregrine nests and that pretty much sums up June 2012 - a month to forget on the whole!! Here are some highlights

And you thought wing-tags came ready made!! All those episodes of Blue Peter and sticky-back plastic weren't a waste of time after all!!

Adam McClure, the RSPB's Northern Ireland Red Kite Project Officer joined us for a week in early June for a bit of training in how to fit wing-tags

with a bit of Great Black-backed Gull strangling thrown in for good measure - it''s the safest way to hold them!

That's worth four in the bush!!

Although 55 more Little Egrets were colour-ringed during the month not all of them fledged successfully, including this poor bird which got itself stuck halfway down one of the big spruce trees the nests are in.

2 of this year's Barn Owl crop. A female on the left (note the buff breast and darker face) and a male on the right. The number of pairs has increased again following the mild winter and some pairs were very early but brood sizes are generally rather poor with lots of twos.

Kestrels on the other hand seem to be doing quite well, at least those in nest boxes and buildings are! The four broods colour-ringed so far were of 6, 5, 5 and 4.

The view from outside the above kestrel nest - who needs ladders? Safe, perfectly safe!!

and some hardy Merlins to return to in early July.

Little......egrets!!!

On Tuesday Adrienne Stratford, Kelvin Jones, Rob Sandham,  Hamza and I headed into a heronry near Bangor to colour-ring Little Egrets. We have been colour-ringing at the site for the past four years and with the 37 ringed on the day have now marked nearly 200 chicks in total. Sightings have been received from far and wide including Scotland, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland and even one to Tenerife in the Canary Islands!

Last year the productivity was pretty poor with many nests predated by a pair of Ravens. The colony has split this year with the majority of nests in a new location and the number of young present seemed good, although not as good as in 2010 when the trees were alive with little Little Egrets. Several nests still contained eggs though so another visit is on the cards for the end of June.

Spot on the optimum age for ringing. Much bigger and its like trying to ring monkeys!

The aforementioned monkey! Playing chase with an incredibly agile Egret in the top of a 50ft Christmas tree has to be done extremely carefully and loud outbursts of frustration are not unusual!

I'll have a P please Rob!

Grrrrrr!!

Wayward Woodcock

Over the past month followers of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust's woodcockwatch website www.woodcockwatch.com have been amazed at the impressive distance travelled by one of the 12 woodcock satellite tagged in the UK last winter. 'Monkey' tagged in Cornwall on March 21st finally arrived at his breeding destination north of Krasnoyarsk on May 15th.

 This location in Russia is at the same latitude as western Mongolia and 6200 km from his wintering ground in Cornwall.
This might have been thought of as an aboration as all the other woodcock have only travelled a couple of thousand kilometers. However last week The Woodcock Network received news from Tony Cross of a very exciting woodcock ring recovery which suggests that some of our woodcock do travel similar distances.

The woodcock ringed by Terence Lambert near Clywedog, Powys on March 9th 2011 was shot in Pervomayskiy Turkmenistan on April 26th 2012. This represents a journey of 4989 km, what is astonishing is that this is an area of desert to the north east of Tehran and east of the Caspian Sea, quite what this woodcock was doing there is anyones guess.

In April I open my bill!

In May I get fitted with a satellite tag!!

I spent a couple of very enjoyable days near Tregaron this past week with BTO researchers Chris Hewson and Phil Atkinson and their Welsh Development Officer, Kelvin Jones, catching Cuckoos for their continuing research on the migration of this amazing bird. More can be read on the BTO Cymru website and hopefully the birds will be going live on the BTO website soon so you can follow their movements and migrations almost as they happen.

1st raptor pullus of 2012

This morning, myself and Tony met at 06:00 in an attempt to kick start our raptor ringing of 2012.  Despite the Peregrine chick below being the only raptor ringed today, it was't all bad news.

Firstly because this was a 'new' Peregrine site for us, and secondly because we managed to find 2 active Kestrel nests and a Hobby kicking a Crow out of it's nest!

Other birds ringed today included a brood of 3 Crows, and a brood of Wheatears.  A Chiffchaff nest was also found, but the chicks were too small to ring.

Chough ringing's pants?

Only very rarely!!

Last Thursday, Adrienne and I arrived at this Chough nest site a bit too late after the low tide. A quick risk assessment was conducted and it showed that their was indeed a risk that we might miss them if we had to come back another day, hence the unconventional (but perfectly safe) measures adopted!!

Thankfully the Chough season is drawing to an end now and so far this year we have colour-ringed over 200 chicks between us. Many thanks to all those who have provided essential assistance including Claire Mucklow, Kelvin Jones, Frankie Hobro, Chris Bridge, Gillian Dinsmore, Hamza, Zac Hinchcliffe, Gareth Richardson, Wendy James, Ivan Jones, Denise Shaw, Jane and anyone else I have forgotten to mention.

Ceredigion Choughs and Cormorants

Last Tuesday Gareth Richardson, Jane and I carried on the quest for Choughs on the Ceredigion coast and another four broods (totalling 10 chicks) were ringed. We also managed to catch two adults including a 14 year old male whose original BTO ring and surviving colour-rings were wearing a bit thin so he was duly equipped with new ones to last him the next 14 years!

We also managed to ring a few broods of Cormorants in passing. I don't ring many Cormorants as the colonies here are on vertical cliffs and great care needs to be taken that larger young don't scramble out of the nest with an associated risk of falling. When I first came to Aberystwyth in 1982 the Cormorant colony at Penderi, south of Aberystwyth, was something in the order of 250 pairs, today a count of 50 pairs would be good. A similar rate of decline has been seen at Bird Rock near Tywyn down from ca. 150 pairs to about 40. These declines are probably related to declining fish stocks but previous ringing recoveries have shown that some young birds travel down to South-East England and France during their first winter where they (frequently?) get shot!

PC Richardson cuffing a Cormorant

A Cuckoo on boxing day!

Spent most of the day yesterday checking nest-boxes in two schemes near Tregaron with Caroline and the girls. Both sets of boxes have been in operation for over twenty years and it is interesting to see how things change slightly over time. This year seems to be a bit on the late side generally, although 1 nest of Nuthatches had already flown. Out of 146 boxes checked 111 were occupied as follows; 46 Pied Flycatcher, 39 Blue Tit, 13 Great Tit, 6 Redstart, 4 Nuthatch and 3 Robin. During the day we ringed just 10 Nuthatch, 14 Great Tit, 5 Robin and 5 Blue Tit pull but also caught 14 female Pied Flycatchers.

6 Redstart clutches was an above average occupancy for this species

Out of 14 female Pied Flycatchers caught only 2 were previous year's re-traps. A worryingly low re-trap rate compared to earlier years.

The journey home added a couple of unusual suspects!!

A female cuckoo, and 

a now famous Grouse!
(famous with me anyway as it is the first I've ringed!)

Sorted for E's and Whimbs

There's a pretty hefty passage of Whimbrel at the moment so on Saturday night I headed down the coast to try and get a few more colour-ringed. Good job its Chough ringing time of year as well otherwise I might have been caught out with insufficient ring stock!! Amazingly I managed to catch 30, that surely has to be some sort of record Whimbrel catch!! Had enough E's on me but ran out of colour-rings with one bird left to do - sod's law is that'll be the one! Certainly a night to remember and a counteraction to all those doom and gloom stories about how good things used to be! Still can't quite believe it!

The following day saw Paddy Jenks and his daughter Deryn, Wendy James and I tackling some of the more difficult to access Chough nests in south Ceredigion. Four nests checked and 3 broods colour-ringed (2 x 4, 1 x 2). The other was still sitting on 4 eggs so need to go back in a months's time. Slept well last night!

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.