Bird Ringing Update

Monday, June 1st 2015

Many of the woodlands across the training area are home to small nest boxes which are used by several tit species, Pied Flycatchers and Redstart. The bird ringers have been very busy over the past few weeks visiting all of these woodlands to survey the boxes and are now starting to make return visits to the woodlands to ring the chicks.

We re-visited one woodland this morning expecting to find chicks large enough to ring, however, many of the birds were still incubating their eggs, in other boxes the chicks were only just hatching. We suspect that the cold temperatures are in part responsible for this. Insects are also appearing much later than usual which will have a knock on effect for birds feeding their young all resulting in a slower rate of development and growth.

Several Pied Flycatchers have been controlled in our nest boxes this year; this means that they were ringed at another site before the bird ringers found them nesting on the training area. It will be interesting to see where they have come from once the data is returned from the BTO.

Several Redstart nests have also been found; these birds did not have a fantastic year in 2014 so we are glad to have found more nests this year and to have ringed the first brood of chicks earlier today.

As well as all of the smaller nest boxes the bird ringers have been out re-visiting the Kestrel boxes over the last week and to date have ringed about 30 chicks, with about 30-40 more to ring over the coming days. A good number of Kestrels are still sitting on eggs, which is unusual this late on into the spring.

Thank you to all of those who have helped with this and all the other bird ringing activities associated with the reserve.

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