A friend of mine who has ringed with me a couple of times in Gambia had business in Wiltshire on 28th January and we are off on another foreign expedition on 30th so it seemed like a great excuse to get together and fit in a days ringing farmland birds and talk about our impending trip. Our best farmland bird site was prepared especially but the only problem was that none of my team could make a Tuesday so I enlisted the help of Mike Hamzij and Andrew Bray.
As we set nets in the dark it was breezier than forecast but as often happens at this site, the wind died down at dawn and we ringed in near perfect conditions. This is a stunning farmland site that still operates as a mixed farm and it is my largest Tree Sparrow colony and wintering site. We started the morning off by setting an eighteen foot net especially for a Little Owl and sure enough it worked, so Sam got to ring his first Little Owl. With the others doing the first net round I quickly rustled up a round of bacon sandwiches to get us energised for the morning.
Clouds of Yellowhammers and Tree Sparrows swirled around and we were soon very busy. The net set especially for Linnets worked and we had a netful of them. A couple of Corn Buntings and a rare thing – a retrap Corn Bunting were good but it soon became clear that this was going to be a special day for Tree Sparrows. Surprise of the day was a rogue House Sparrow that had infiltrated the Tree Sparrow flock and the number of Reed Buntings was pretty remarkable.
231 new and 74 retraps made for a busy morning. The amount of Tree Sparrows present was remarkable and this was our second highest catch of Tree Sparrows. Most of the retraps were from the same site but there were over ten movements up to 5km and two movements of 8-10km.
Afterwards, Sam and went to a farm where the farmer had left me to load the grain myself...
We then fed three sites on the way home and bumped into a farmer who l had been meaning to meet so that we could look around his farm to agree where we could plant hedges to help farmland birds. So we had a tour of the estate in a UTV seeing places where other folks just can’t access. MP, MH, AB, SB
Little Owl 1, Tree Sparrow 38 (57), Yellowhammer 76 (8), Corn Bunting 2 (1), Reed Bunting 31 (2), Linnet 45, Chaffinch 12 (1), Goldfinch 2, House Sparrow 1, Dunnock 12 (2), Robin 6, Blackbird 1, Great Tit 1 (3), Blue Tit 1, Wren 2