With seemingly endless Storm force/Gale froce winds since November it had been very quiet on the ringing front for myself, although Sean had been managing to keep wooshing
Linnets and trapping
Rock Pipits. As a result of not getting any netting done, I had given up all hope of hitting the 5000 new birds total for the year as we were a couple of hundred short coming up to the start of this week.
On Monday, whilst I was working, Sean met up with Chris and Kay at the garden site near Sulby and had a decent catch of 102 birds, of which 62 were new.
Sean rang me that evening and asked if we could meet up at the garden site at the Ballaugh Curraghs the next morning as the wind was forecast to be suitable. I didn't need asking twice, despite working late that evening. So on Tuesday Ffyn and I met Sean there for 9am and by midday we had caught 139 birds, of which 101 were new. The total included a super little first year male
Sparrowhawk!
Blue Tit 46 (+15 retraps)
Great Tit 28 (+21 retraps)
Goldfinch 14
Coal Tit 7 (+2 retraps)
Chaffinch 4
Robin 1
Sparrowhawk 1
First year Male Sparrowhawk
Checking the weather for the next day, we decided to do our other garden site at St Johns the next morning. So after my late shift at work and grabbing a bit of sleep I met up with Sean again on Wednesday morning. We had a very pleasant mornings ringing, being looked after like Royalty as ever by Christine! We ended the morning having caught 102 birds of which 87 were new.
Blue Tit 23 (+3 retraps)
Coal Tit 18 (+8 retraps)
Great Tit 15
Chaffinch 10 (+2 retraps)
Siskin 9 (+1 retrap)
Blackbird 5
Goldfinch 3
Robin 2
Dunnock 1
Greenfinch 1
House Sparrow 1 retrap
Siskin
An excellent few days garden ringing with 343 birds caught in the 3 days and 250 of them being new birds.
Looking at the retraps over the last few days it has been good to see the high adult survival during the year in
Blue and
Great Tits across the sites with a very high number of adults from previous years being recaught.
More worringly though is the very low number of young birds being caught in
Blue Tits. Despite a high fledging success rate in our nest box studies, we are catching relatively few frist year birds (birds hatched this year) compared to the long-term average. On checking with other ringers elsewhere, this seems to be the case across parts of North West England and Scotland too.
Could this be poor survival post fledging due to the bad weather in the summer?
Of the young birds that we have been catching, it was pleasing to see good numbers of birds that had been ringed as chicks as part of the nest box studies at Close Sartfield MWT reserve and the Curraghs Wildlife Park during the sessions at the garden site at the Ballaugh Curraghs.
We also had some good longevity records with 2
Great Tits and a
Chaffinch retrapped more than 5 years after ringing and a further 2
Great Tits over 2 years since ringing.
We also had our first movement between garden sites with a
Great Tit from the Sulby site to the Curraghs site.
Thanks to Ron & Hazel (Sulby), Barry & Christine (St Johns) and Steve and Sue (Curraghs) for letting us use their fantastic gardens for ringing and for all the tea, coffee and biscuits!!
