CES Visit 9 Sunday 24th July 2016

Visit 9 is now our best catch, we ended this session on 55. We have beaten our previous total for a session this season so far, our record was up until now 51 caught on visit 7. Last year visit 9 produced 38 so well up on last years too. Again, the most abundant species caught on this visit was Chiffchaff with another 10 caught, 8 new which were all juveniles, this brings our juvenile Chiff to 45 compared to our lowest number of any juvenile caught on site this season, 2 Willow Warbler!

Only our 2nd juvenile Willow Warbler of the season so far.

The weather from 05.30 until around 11.00 was overcast with very little wind, then a light shower of rain come over the valley, we hurriedly checked the nets, fortunately it only lasted around 5 minutes, along with this shower it also brought our largest catch on a single net round for a long time with 21 birds caught, a flock of juvenile Blue & Great Tits were amongst the catch, which most certainly boosted the amount of birds caught on the day to bring us to our new total. We packed our nets up around 12.30 just before the rain decided to set in for the rest of the afternoon.

	Total New	Retraps
Blackbird	1	1
Blackcap	4
Blue Tit	3	3
Bullfinch	3
Chiffchaff	8	2
Dunnock	4
Great Tit	8
Robin	5	1
Song Thrush	1
Treecreeper		1
Whitethroat	4
Willow Warbler	1
Wren	4	1
13 Species	46	9

Lothian Ringing Group run 2 Constant Effort Sites. Visit 9 totals from our longest running CES (1991) also had their best session of the season so far today. 

Species	Total	Retraps
Blackbird	3
Blackcap	17
Blue Tit	1
Bullfinch	6
Coal Tit	1
Chiffchaff	10
Dunnock	4
Great Tit	3
Kingfisher	2
Robin	4
Songthrush	1
Whitethroat	1
Willow Warbler	5
Wren	1
14 Species	59

Sand Martins Saturday 23/07/2016

This 10m banking has 9 active nest holes. So far this year we have managed to catch 61 Sand Martins over 2 sessions, 20 of these have been juveniles, not too bad for this small colony. 2 re-traps, 1 from July 2014 & 1 from June 2015.

Juvenile Sand Martin

Saturday morning we arrived on site for 03:15hrs to have the nets in place prior to sunrise, we usually just set the one net alongside the small colony, but having seen Common Sandpiper on this stretch we decided to set another 12m net across the river, on returning to check the nets and extract, there was no Sandpiper, we had a few Sand Martin. However, imagine our surprise when our first of 2 Kingfishers were caught in the net we had erected over the river this morning.

On a later check of the nets we flushed some Mallard as we approached them, one flew into the net, we tried to run through the water to make sure it didn't escape, we were about one metre away from securing it when, yeah, you guessed, it escaped! I guess our fitness levels aren't what they used to be.

CES Visit 8 Sunday 17th July 2016

     

Looking at the  majority of weather sites yesterday they were all predicting the wind to be around 14mph gusting to 28mph. However as we set our nets up in a valley our site is pretty sheltered from SSW winds most of the time especially where our nets are set up. We were contemplating calling it off on Saturday night having let our distance travellers know that there would be a chance that this visit may not take place, they could then relish in the fact that they would get their Sunday morning lie-in after all. It was then decided that Alan and I would meet just after 5am to see whether it would be viable to continue with setting our nets up. After a quick walk around the site we decided that we were going to escape the worst of the wind knowing it wouldn't have any adverse effect on our nets. We then erected our nets, stepping up the timing between net rounds alleviated any concerns we may have had as all our nets were undisturbed between the scrub and trees. 

We quickly knew that after a few rounds we weren't going to achieve the amount of birds that we had caught the previous week on Visit 7. The total for todays session as you can see below was lower but not for Chiffchaff we were 5 up on last weeks total with 13 new Juveniles caught 1 re-trap Juvenile from an earlier session this season and 1 re-trap from 2015. 

Visit 8 last year produced 49 birds.

Although the previous 7 sessions we had managed to catch adults, we were graced with our first 2 Juvenile Bullfinch of the season along with what we presume was their mother in the same net, which we had caught on an earlier visit.

Species	Total New	Retraps
Blackbird	1
Blackcap	1
Blue Tit	2
Bullfinch	2	1
Chiffchaff	13	2
Dunnock	2
Great Tit	1
Song Thrush	1
Treecreeper		1
Whitethroat	1
Wren	3	1
11 Species	27	5

Sunday 10th July 2016

CES Visit 7 Sunday 10/07/16

The team all met before 05:30hrs. Willie, Alan, Calum, Chris, Pip, Sarah, Helen. The usual 7 nets totalling 340ft were erected pretty swiftly with a larger team present than usual.

50 birds captured on Visit 1 helped lift our spirits with a great start to the season. However, all subsequent visits after this produced far less with Visit 4 being our worst catch so far with only 11 birds caught, we thought 50 was going to prove difficult to beat, that was until Visit 7 arrived.

Did we beat our previous best this season? We sure did, we now have a new record for 2016, wait for it! 51 is now the target to beat! This also smashes visit 7 from 2015 by 25, fingers crossed we have a successful run with our next 5 visits.

Species	Total	Retraps
Blackbird	1
Blackcap	6
Blue Tit	5
Chiffchaff	10	3
Dunnock	6	1
Great Tit	8	3
Robin	2	1
Treecreeper	2	1
Whitethroat	2
Willow Warbler	1
Wren	8	1
11 Species	51	10

The team having a lengthy discussion about how we could top our best catch this season. Then again it might have been a more important discussion, whether to have an apple turnover or a chocolate chip cookie with coffee in between rounds.

Inchcolm LBBGUs

A successful trip was made to Inchcolm Island on the Forth to start a new project colour-ringing lesser blacked-backed gull chicks. The project hopes to increase knowledge of LBBGU movements; distribution of wintering grounds and breeding site fidelity of the Forth birds. The ongoing baseline effort is to colour-ring one hundred chicks each year on the island. The colour-rings are orange with 4 letter alpha-numeric codes, with three numerical digits followed by a colon and ‘F’ (for Forth) e.g. 001:F.

100:F the hundredth chick ringed! (Calum Campbell)

The colour-rings have been funded by the SOC Endowment fund and the metal rings kindly provided by Lothian Ringing Group. Special thanks to John Davies for securing project funding and organising the trip to Inchcolm. Thanks also to Liz Humphreys, Rob Campbell, Jeroen Minderman, James Leyden and Sarah Long for their efforts in getting the project up and running.

The ringing team (Calum Campbell).

We look forward to the sightings! Please report any sightings to johncdavies@blueyonder.co.uk.

Calum