With CES 11 being such a heavy session, with over 100 birds caught, I decided to enlist help from other members of the West Wilts Ringing Group. Ian Grier and Andy Palmer augmented my team of Ellie Jones and Charlie Stockley (not forgetting his dad, Neil). Although it was a much quieter session than the last, the additional help was invaluable, as I could work with Charlie to continue his training on extracting birds, whilst Ellie, Andy and Ian got on with dealing with the other birds.
The highlight of the session was catching our second Green Woodpecker in eight days. To put it into perspective, as a trainee I was lucky enough to extract two of them (one at Ravensroost, the other at Swindon Sewage Works) but wasn't allowed to ring either of them. Once I got my C-permit I was lucky enough to catch and ring one at my Wood Lane site on my first ever independent ringing session, subsequently I caught another at Lower Moor Farm in April 2014. Having ringed those two, Ellie and Andy drew lots for the privilege and Andy won. It was his first, so he was happy about it. This bird was an adult male, which you can contrast with the previous photo, which was a juvenile male.
During a lull in our ringing activities, Ian noticed some commotion on the far side of Mallard Lake (our ringing station is in the picnic area opposite the lakeside house). We could see water shooting into the air. On looking through the binoculars you could see a large flock of House Martins dive-bombing the water and sending up plumes of water. It was quite remarkable. The water plumes were visible via the naked eye from some 200 metres away, so they must have been throwing up quite a lot of water. Most of us will have seen, or seen film of, Swallows skimming the water to drink or pick off insects; none of us have ever seen anything like this activity with House Martins before.
The list for the session was: Green Woodpecker 1; Treecreeper 1(1); Blue Tit 2; Great Tit (1); Long-tailed Tit 1(2); Wren (1); Robin 5(2); Blackcap 1(5); Garden Warbler 1; Whitethroat 1; Lesser Whitethroat 2; Chiffchaff 8(1); Willow Warbler 3; Goldcrest 1; Chaffinch 1; Greenfinch 1; Bullfinch 1(2). Totals: 29 birds ringed from 15 species; 15 retrapped birds from 8 species, making a total of 44 birds processed from 17 species.
The catch died off after 11:00 and at 11:30 we closed the nets and took them down. ST/IG/EJ/AP/CS/NS