Blog posts have been a bit thin on the ground lately, mainly because it's not worth writing about attempts to catch Turnstone to be thwarted by regular feeders that draw the birds from the place where we have the best chance of capturing some before dog walkers flush them, or worse their canine friends gobble up the bait. That has at least allowed some time for a bit of public relations talk. There were also two failed attempts to capture and colour ring Blackcaps visiting a coastal garden at Cley-next-the-sea. On both attempts the weather wasn't ideal, but we are racing against the final date of the project on winter visiting Blackcaps this season so we tried anyway.
But, this morning looked as though the wind would be low enough to try a few mist nets. We went to a location on the farm that we haven't tried before. Siting nets was difficult as there were few opportunities to site through the hedgerows and the few nets we did get up were wind affected before long. We caught 29 birds, but better than that found a better place to base with more opportunities to erect nets further along the track. We also spoke to one of the farm workers that gets Tree Sparrows in his garden. An opportunity for later in the year perhaps. We didn't see any Tree Sparrows during this session.
Our main problem was that most of the finches tended to fly to the tops of the hedges rather than into them. Our nets were frequently flown over and the numbers of tits and Blackbirds caught reflected the different way that those birds flew to the hedgerow.
Total: 28 (1)
Blackbird - 5
Robin - 1 (1)
Dunnock - 3
Blue Tit - 7
Great Tit - 8
Brambling - 1
Chaffinch - 1
Reed Bunting - 1
Yellowhammer - 1