CES Visit 5 17/06/2018

To-day we had our best catch beating Visit 1 by 1 bird.

It was recognisable by the calls that there were a lot more Juvenile birds around this morning and we weren't disappointed. Still a lack of Chiffchaff which was a big concern, it certainly seems that the earlier 'Beast from the East' had taken it's toll with our regular migrant visitors as we seemed to be catching a lot more local breeders compared to this time last year!

What was very pleasing regarding local birds was the first Greenfinch we had caught on a C.E.S visit for a long time. They are very few and far between these days on our site and this was to be the only one we would catch this C.E.S season, we reckon it must have been passing through the site rather than holding territory?

We also managed to catch our first Juvenile Long-tailed tits of the season, with 4 being caught in the same net.

Species	Total New	Retraps
Blackcap	2
Blue Tit	4	3
Chaffinch	1
Chiffchaff	2
Common Whitethroat	1	1
Dunnock		2
Greenfinch	1
Long-tailed Tit	4
Great Tit		2
Robin	3
Willow Warbler	1
Song Thrush	1
Wren		1
13 Species	20	9

CES Visit 4 09/06/2018

We couldn't have wished for better conditions this morning, no wind and just a small amount of sun peeking out of the clouds.

Visit 4 heralded the start of the Juveniles....hurray we should catch a lot more now that they have started to fledge, things are looking up?

Again, all nets set by 06.30 to start our first round, it took us to reach net 5 before we caught our first bird of the morning but it was our first Juvenile....a Robin.

Round 2 we caught 3 birds all re-trap adults. It wasn't until 09:00 that we caught our next birds well when I say birds of course I meant bird, a re-trap Great Tit. 09.30 produced our 2nd Juvvie....a Coal Tit. We ended up catching 2 Coati's from the same net, good to see evidence that they were breeding on site. What's interesting is how very few Chiffchaff we have caught this year so far compared to the end of Visit 4 in 2017. Last year we had caught 31 Chiffchaff by this visit....this year 4 so far!!!!

We ended up catching 18 birds today.

Net Lane 2 where we caught our first Juveniles Coal Tits of the season

Species	Total New	Retraps
Blackbird	1	3
Blackcap		2
Chiffchaff		1
Coal Tit		2
Dunnock	1
Common Whitethroat	1
Great Tit		2
Robin	1	1
Willow Warbler	1
Wren	1	1
10 Species	6	12

CES Visit 3 26/05/2018

We were hoping to exceed our catch from our last visit (2) which we thought wouldn't be an impossibility, there was a light breeze with sun shining through periodically between the clouds. 

Arriving on site for 05.15 we duly erected our 7 nets and by the time we started our first net round low and behold....one less bird caught than what we managed to catch on the first round of Visit 2. It was starting to look pretty similar.

The 2nd round of the morning coincidently produced the same as visit 2 ONE bird! Round 3 again one bird.

It wasn't until round 4 that we started to catch more, however by the end of visit 3 we didn't catch a whole load more than Visit 2, with only19 birds caught in total to-day. What was most pleasing though was things were starting to look good for Common Whitethroats on site with 4 new birds 2 Female & 2 Male. Hopefully Visit 4 will be more productive?

4 new common Whitethroat to-day

Species	Total New	Retraps
Blackbird	3	2
Blackcap	1
Blue Tit	1	3
Chaffinch		1
Dunnock		2
Common Whitethroat	4
Song Thrush	1
Willow Warbler	1
8 Species	11	8

CES Visit 2 19/05/2018

Visit 2 was looking pretty ominous. We realised within the first two rounds that this morning wasn't going to very productive...we were proved to be right with our prediction. 15 birds were caught with re-traps outnumbering new birds a first for a very long time. Although, one of the re-traps was by far very pleasing, one of the Chaffinch we re-trapped to-day was an adult male who we ringed on 4th January 2013 on site....so at least 6 years old, this makes it all worth while knowing that there are still old friends coming back to breed on site!

Heading down to-wards our first net ride

Species	Total New	Retraps
Blackbird	2	1
Blackcap	1
Blue Tit		1
Chaffinch		2
Dunnock	1	1
Great Tit	1	1
Song Thrush	1
Common Whitethroat	1
Wren		2
9 Species	7	8

CES Visit 1 06/05/2018

The Constant Effort Sites Scheme aims to gather information, which will help to explain bird population changes, through a programme of standardised summer mist-netting at sites in specific habitats. A series of standard net-sites are used to gather trapping data. It is important that the net positions and the number and type (i.e length, height and mesh) of nets remain constant for each visit in both initial and subsequent years.

This is now the 11th year that we have been running a Constant Effort site at SWT Hadfast Valley.

We also had a nice surprise this year with one particular species returning to breed after a break of 11 years, the last time we caught one on site was 2007....but more of that later on Visit 9.

CES Visit 1 - 06/05/2018

We arrive on site each visit for around 05.30 each session and look to be packed up by 12.30. Our first visit this year compared to 2017 is one species less with ten birds less also. However, its always nice to have returning birds being faithful to the site year after year. One of the returning Chiffchaff was ringed in 2016 as an adult male, the returning Common Whitethroat was also ringed in 2016.

Song Thrush Anvil on site

Species 2018	New	Retraps
Blackbird	1	1
Blackcap	6
Bullfinch	2
Chiffchaff	1	2
Dunnock	1	1
Goldfinch	1
Robin		2
Song Thrush	2
Willow Warbler	4
C. Whitethroat		1
Wren	4
11 Species	22	7

04/02/20018

It was -3 degrees and dark when we arrived at 06:45 to start setting the nets up for our first New Year session one of our local sites. The feeders are filled frequently over the winter period to make sure our on site breeding birds are kept in tip-top condition for the season ahead.

Our on-site fly-thru selection keeps our resident birds from going hungry over the winter.

As usual the the first round is always pretty slow to start with, 5 birds caught, a re-captured Wren that was ringed on 26/03/17....the first 2 of 10 new Blackbirds of the morning were also caught....this is the most Blackbirds that have been caught in a morning session on site, there must have been a fall of Blackbirds the night before as the site was holding much more than we usually see or catch.

The next round would have also been pretty quiet if there wasn't a small family of Long-tailed tits visiting the fat balls on one of our net rides - 6 of them caught altogether 3 new and 3 re-traps which were ringed together back on 13/11/2016, always good to know that they have survived a couple of years together. A Treecreeper was also in amongst this catch which was ringed as a juvenile on CES visit 5 in June 2017.

As the sun started to come through and the mist lifted the subsequent rounds brought out a lot more Blue, Coal & Great tits....it was pleasing once again to re-capture our oldest bird of the day - a male Great tit, ringed in August 2014, hopefully he's back on site to put claim to a nest box with the female we caught in the same net, she was ringed in November 2016?

Our last round of the day produced the star of the day....A male Great-spotted finger pecker. This bird was a recent addition to the database, he was ringed at our ringing session that we had with East Lothian Council junior rangers back in November, as you can see if you take your eye of him for one minute while holding him, he'll thank you nicely for supplying a never ending source of suet and peanuts for it to feed on, I suppose it didn't draw too much blood!

Thank-you

Ringing Demo for East Lothian Council Junior Rangers 24/11/2017

This demo was a couple of months in the planning as the Junior Rangers diary is a very busy one. Although we had pencilled in another date incase the weather was going to be inclement, although we wanted this date to go ahead as we know how busy they are. The time we had pencilled in for them to come along was 14:00hrs, the forecast the day before predicted no rain....why do we look at forecasts? On the morning of the 24th it now predicted wind & rain in the afternoon, of course we are at the mercy of the weather and we were now uncertain if it was such a good idea to continue. The consensus was we did and hope for the best, if it came to the time when the Junior rangers were due to arrive and the weather took a turn for the worse then we would make that decision to postpone and just have a walk around the site to further their outdoor education about the importance of our site with its SSSI status for its scrub habitats and associated breeding birds.                                                                                                                         

Richard English, Jen Newcombe & Duncan Priddle all work as full time wardens with E.L.C and are out most Friday afternoons with the Juniors....Duncan is a qualified bird ringer and a member of Lothian RG who was already acquainted with some of the juniors that were coming along to-day.
It was windy & raining when we arrived at 13:00hrs to set up our nets prior to the Juniors arriving, it very much looked like we were going to have to postpone this demo and have some very disappointed faces when they arrived.

It was now13:40hrs we were starting to become worried but suddenly the rain stopped....we quickly opened our nets before their arrival....we thought even if we managed to catch a few birds before the rain started again then at least they would experience the thrill of being involved with how we catch and process the birds prior to releasing them while all the time explaining why we do carry out bird ringing and the scientific value behind the BTO ringing scheme.

12 of the regular Juniors had excitedly wanted to come along to our demo, it was also such a pleasant surprise to see our local artist Darren Woodhead come along with his 3 Juniors....15 Juniors on the day had the pleasure of witnessing (at least the majority of them for the first time) wild birds being caught & released by trained bird ringers.

We seen the minibus then heard the Juniors arriving, as it's a few minutes walk from the carpark to where we had set up our base we decided to go and check our nets so that we had a few birds for them to see as they arrived.....it was pretty cold and didn't want them hanging around too long before experiencing what they had come along to see.

As they arrived and hurriedly gathered around our table we managed to bring back a small selection of birds for them to try and guess which bird species it was.....of course most of them knew what they were.....especially when a very excited cry went out from one of the Juniors "wow- a woodpecker" we don't catch a lot of woodpeckers on our site...maybe 2 a year so to catch 3 Great spotted woodpeckers in a 2 hour session was not only pleasing for the ringers but especially for the Juniors, to witness them so close up in the hand was pretty special....you can imagine how many hands went up when asked who would like to release them!

Laura one of our LRG ringers explaining how to
carefully release the Woodpecker

Throughout the 2 hours when the Juniors were along we managed to catch 25 birds of 6 species....Blue + Great tits were also much of a favourite for them to see so close up....one Junior in particular was hoping that we could catch one of his favourite birds and up until the very last moment as we were taking the nets down we managed to catch 2 of his favourite birds which was a Robin.

Duncan explaining how we catch the birds in the mist nets

"Everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves and myself and Jen were chatting afterwards about what a success it was, there was nothing but positivity regarding the day (once they’d warmed up)". (Richard English E.L.C)