CES Visit 11 Sunday 14/08/2016

Visit 11 was an improvement on visit 10 but still below our best catch from visit 9. On our previous 10 visits this season we have only managed to catch 2 adult female Chaffinch, today we managed to catch 5 juveniles, a few singing males earlier on in the season but unfortunately never managed to catch any yet, with only one visit left after this it's looking like we might not.

Another 7 new juvenile Chiffchaff were caught today, this now takes our total to 59 Juveniles caught. It'll be interesting to see our totals after our 12th and final visit of the season takes place.

Unknown to us the Midlothian Walking Festival was taken place from Friday 12th - Monday 15th August. One of the walks surprisingly took them around our ringing site, they all seemed very surprised and inquisitive to what we were up to and us with them as we never usually have many folk walking around our site, even though it's a SWT reserve there are very few visitors pass through.

After they had completed there walk around the reserve and before walking on to there next destination time was afforded to watch us processing some of the birds that we had caught, a few didn't recognise one of the birds in particular, as it was still in full juvenile plumage it didn't have it's distinct red breast, they never thought it could be a Robin. After thanking us to for an impromptu ringing demonstration they departed to continue there 5.5 mile walk along part of the Pencaitland Railway walk.

An unexpected Bird Ringing demo for Midlothian walking festival participants.

Species	Total New	Retraps
Blackbird	1
Blackcap	1	1
Bullfinch	2
Chaffinch	6
Chiffchaff	8	4
Dunnock	2
Great Tit	2	2
Robin	4	1
Whitethroat	1
Willow Warbler	1
Wren	5	2
11 Species	33	9

CES Visit 10 Saturday 06/08/16

Visit 10 started at the usual time of 05:30. Very unusual for only 2 of us to manage along this morning. However, nets were duly erected and the first round of the morning began as soon as the last net was in position. Anticipation was high especially after visit 9 produced our best catch of the season. We were soon left wondering if this was going to be our worst session so far, by 10:45 over 5 hours later we had only caught 8 birds. The others that usually come out with us must have had some kind of premonition that this was going to be one of those days. The coffee out the flask was about empty when I suggested that we should really go and do another net round. Hallelujah, we more than doubled our tally of what we had caught all morning, this net round produced a grand total of 13, taking us to 21. We only managed to add another 5 birds by the time we had packed up at 12.30.

Another 8 new Chiffchaff with all but one being Juvenile, this now brings our Juvenile Chiff's up to 52.

Species	Total	Retraps
Blackcap	1
Blue Tit	3	1
Bullfinch	1
Chiffchaff	8
Dunnock	3
Robin	5
Wren	5	1
7 Species	26	2

Apart from 2013-14 being quite exceptional, I suppose there hasn't been a great deal of variation in totals over the years, since we started our CES back in 2008 visit 10 has produced:

2008 = 29
2009 = 30
2010 = 34
2011 = 28
2012 = 34
2013 = 68
2014 = 47
2015 = 26
2016 = 26