Black Park Country Park and Mute swans at various locations - 17th October 2019

On the first session of the autumn here, we hoped to target mainly Redwing and Redpolls. There was a large flock of Redwing, but they remained at the tops of the tall trees although we did manage to catch one of them. The Redpoll tape played to itself as there was only a couple of birds present and they didn't respond. We did get some Goldcrest, as anticipated. However, the leading species of the morning was Blue Tit. There were several groups through the site and we had no same day retraps. This appears to reflect reports that Blue Tits have had a good breeding year and numbers are up on what we would usually expect.

A couple of Crossbill flew over late morning.

Total: 50

Robin - 4
Wren - 4
Dunnock - 1
Redwing - 1
Goldcrest - 15
Blue Tit - 22
Coal Tit - 1
Great Tit - 2

We saw the ranger and he told us that a young swan with a darvic had been collected by a swan rescue organisation on the 16th after a 'crash landing' on a grassy area. He didn't know the ring code and we don't expect the organisation to report it as in our experience, the tend not to.

We then went and checked the Langley Park lake, finding an adult and two juvenile swans. They were not members of the family that had spent the summer there. The adult and one juvenile were not ringed. When we captured the previously ringed juvenile and added 4DHM darvic, the metal ring, W47488, was not one of ours. Having reported the ring, we now know that the cygnet was ringed on 17th July at Wargrave, near Henley.

We then tried for the four cygnets on Harmondsworth lake that, capturing just one to fit darvic 4DHQ and metal ring W41993. These cygnets have yet to start any post juvenile moult and appear to be managing alone, without the presence of adult swans.

Finally, we spent a little time at the River Thames. Here there were very few birds with darvics, just three issued by the Edward Gray Institute and one from Mike Reed's scheme. We also recorded another eleven metal ring numbers. There is an increasing number of Black-headed gulls on the river but none checked carried any form of ringed identification.

W47730