CES Visit 12 Saturday 27/08/2016

Our 12th and final visit of the season started at our usual 05:30hrs. It wasn't until 07:00hrs before we had our first birds of the day which a pleasurable start with 3 juvenile wrens and chiffs. We just seemed to have that feeling that we weren't going to be inundated with birds, although we shouldn't be surprised as over the years visit 12 is almost always one of our lowest catches.

During the morning we caught another 6 Juvenile Chiffchaff.

We ended our final session with 27 birds, which I suppose was pretty reasonable.

All in all, over our 12 sessions we managed to catch 404 birds (including re-traps) of which 278 birds were new birds! The total species caught throughout the season was 18. It will be no surprise to hear what our most caught species was...yes you guessed Chiffchaff, with 16 adults and 65 juveniles.

One of our re-trap male Bullfinch from today was ringed on CES visit 6 2012 as a Juvenile. We're already looking forward to next season to see how many of our friends will come back to breed once again.

 

Our 58th and last Juv Chiffchaff from our 2016 CES season.

Species	Total New	Retraps
Blackbird	1
Blackcap	1
Bullfinch	2	1
Chiffchaff	8	4
Dunnock	1
Goldcrest	1
Robin	4
Wren	3	1
8 Species	21	6

Lothian's other CES site had a much more productive visit on 17/09/2016. An extra visit to their site produced 43 birds, using 5 out of the 8 CES net locations. The highlight of their day was a trio of Great Spotted Woodpecker which were caught on one round - two of which were in the same net, along with a host of other species throughout the morning session.

Species	Total	Retraps
Blackbird	2
Blackcap	4
Blue Tit	2
Bullfinch	3
Chiffchaff	2
Dunnock	6
Great Spotted Woodpeckers	3
Great Tit	3
Goldcrest	6
Long Tailed Tit	3
Robin	8
Wren	1
12 Species	43

A family of Great Spotted Woodpeckers. Will & Anne (A.Coates pic)

Inchcolm Gull Update

Our first foreign sightings have been reported of two individual lesser-black backed gulls ringed on Inchcolm island this summer. 019:F was reported at Arnela beach, Porto do Son, A Coruña through Antonio Gutierrez (http://gaviotasyanillas.blogspot.com.es/) and 074:F was reported at the nearby Santa Cruz beach, Oleiros La Coruña in northwest Spain by Antonio Lopez Porto.

074:F (Antonio Lopez Porto)

We've also had a much more local sighting, 008:F reported from Baron's Haugh, Motherwell, Scotland.

Thanks to all observers involved in reporting these birds. A great start to the project which will hopefully result in many further records across the wintering grounds of these Inchcolm birds.

Thanks to John Davies for passing on these sightings. 

Calum