Hawfinch prolific

The Hawfinch "catching season" is short - late March to early May. I have been very pleased with my efforts over the last 7 years and some 200 birds ringed, but this season has been really exceptional. With the help of Adrian Thomas and Rob Husbands, the three of us have managed to catch Hawfinch at seven different feeding sites in the Forest of Dean and lower Wye Valley.

In total 228 birds ringed, 37 recaptured from previous years, 74 same season retraps and 1 foreign control (from Norway). Because of the number of sites in operation this year, we have had our first same season movements, showing that a proportion of the population is very mobile in the month leading up to breeding, with movements of up to 20 km. One such bird, ringed on 26th March was photographed by Lewis Thompson 10 km away on 6th April.

Posted on behalf of Jerry Lewis, Photo by Lewis Thomson

Battle of the boxes: update

Last week I reported on a conflict (apparently) that was fatal for a Pied Flycatcher. On the same visit (10 May) I found another box which had a Great Tit’s nest. This contained 5 eggs, but they were unusually deeply buried in the mossy/feather nest material beneath the cup (rather than just lying in the bottom of the cup covered with some loose nest material). In other respects it was a normal Tit’s nest.

Today (17 May) when I inspected the box I was surprised to find it now contained a Pied Flycatcher’s nest (usual grass and stems) with 3 blue eggs. So either the Flycatcher usurped the Tit and took over the box, or the Tit had deserted and the Flycatcher seized the opportunity.

Either way, it’s now Great Tits 1 – Pied Flycatchers 1.

Posted on behalf of David Coker and photo of Great Tit nest by Bob Coyle (not David Coker's nest) .

Greenfinch control comes full circle

The Ringing Office has very extensive paper archives, but storage space is running out, so we are disposing of old recovery letters more than 20 years old. However before disposal we are removing and keeping any attached rings and also keeping samples of all the letters.


A happy coincidence recently was when a volunteer came across a 'BRC16' reporting a Greenfinch control from Dec 1987 in Ireland of a bird which our Ringing Database Officer Dorian Moss had ringed in his garden in Anglesey a few months earlier.


View Dorians Greenfinch recovery in a larger map

The Migration Atlas shows that movements of Greenfinches across the Irish Sea are relatively unusual, so it was rewarding to be reminded of this interesting control.

Battle of the boxes

I am operating a Pied Flycatcher RAS project at a particularly good wood near Presteigne, Powys, and yesterday (10 May) I made my first full inspection of the 88 boxes there, with my new ringing trainee. He looked in one box and said “There seem to be two birds in here, one dead”! I took a look, and saw a brooding Great Tit apparently cuddled up to a dead Pied Flycatcher. Upon removing the flycatcher, without disturbing the tit, I found that it was a ringed male, T600924. I ringed it as a breeding male, age code 6 (adult), in another box 50-75 yards away, on 3rd June last year.

I presume it got into conflict with the Great Tit, and lost (and in such a case my money would generally be on the tit). This is the second year I have had such an event. Last year I was clearing out a Great Tit’s nest after the young had fledged in another wood, and felt a hard lump under the nest material. This turned out to be a dead 5 (Juvenile) male Pied Flycatcher, ring number T600535, which I had ringed as a nestling in that wood in 2008.

Posted on behalf of David Coker. Photo from Dick Jeeves.

Montagu's magic!

On 28 April a friend rang me with the news that he was watching a wing-tagged female Montagu's Harrier in the Horsey area of northeast Norfolk. Even better, he'd been able to read the tags - left wing: black 0 on yellow, right wing: black 0 on green. As the story unfolded, it transpired that the bird had first been seen the day before at Dunwich, Suffolk, but identified as a Hen Harrier. It was seen regularly during the week, finding its way back to Minsmere by 3 May, where Jon Evans managed to capture some interesting images:

With a bit of help from their friends, the Ringing Team quickly tracked down this individual's origin - it was ringed and tagged as a nestling on 18 July 2008 in Villeneuve, France, 817 kilometres south of Horsey.

This is only the third foreign-ringed Montagu's Harrier to be found in the UK. The first was way back in the 1920s; a chick ringed in the Netherlands in June 1928 was reported (in unknown circumstances) in Suffolk a year later. The second was an unfortunate individual found freshly dead on a road at Invershin in Highland, Scotland on 7 October 2002, just 60 days after it was ringed as a nestling in France.

The map below shows just how close the origin of this week's bird was to that of the Scottish recovery.


View Montagu's Harriers in a larger
map