This was the first session here in a long time that we have been able to get on site at the weekend due to the poor weather this summer. This meant that we could get the productive extra nets up on the live fire atrillery range that we're not allowed to use during the week.
All seemed fairly quite the first 2 net rounds with not too many bird around but high quality with an adult and juvenile Grasshopper Warbler together in one net and a very young Redstart that had yet to start it's post juvenile moult and so had probably come from an elisive nearby nest and a very young Stonechat.
After that it all got rather busy. We started catching a few Reed and Sedge Warbler's which isn't bad for a patch of hawthorn scrub on chalk downland as well as a decent number of Garden Warbler's. In fact, we caught goo numbers of all the common warblers including 22 new Willow Warbler's.
We also managed to catch one of our local Nightingale's that was in pristine new plumage, the only female that turned up on site this year from this terminally declining population that had failed to fledge any young which must have been predated just before they were due to leave the nest.
We had our usual bonus net at the bottom of what we call 'chat valley' and this got us 4 juvenile Whinchat's which was followed by an indecisive 10 minutes trying to sex them.
In the end we caught a highly productive 150 new, 29 retraps. GD, PD, OF, AB
Swallow 11pulli, Song Thrush 2(2), Blackbird 1(2), Wren 9(1), Dunnock 1(1), Robin 5(2), Nightingale (1), Redstart 1, Stonechat 1, Whinchat 2, Grasshopper Warbler 2, Reed Warbler 4, Sedge Warbler 7, Garden Warbler 9(1), Blackcap 23(6), Whitethroat 22 (4), Lesser Whitethroat 1(1), Willow Warbler 22(2), Chiffchaff 9(2), Goldcrest 2, Long Tailed Tit 1, Blue Tit 1, Great Tit 1(1), Bullfinch 7(3), Linnet 3, Reed Bunting 1, Yellowhammer 2