What to do

A bright and early start was foiled by cloud and rain so back to bed it was. When I did get up it was still very overcast with a bit of a breeze that left me wondering what to do. Spent some time trying to sort out my laptop as web pages have been increasingly slow to load recently and then often hang. Laptop sort of sorted I decided to do a few chores to stay in the good books.

The wind dropped in the afternoon so I put a net up in the garden and started using the bird table trap. I didn’t expect to catch more than the odd Starling so I also decided to modify a single panel net that had been badly tethered. I haven’t done any net repairs or net building for some time and I soon worked out why. It is not easy.

Ringing was slow as expected but there was a steady trickle of birds as the afternoon progressed. Net modification was much slower due to the lack of practice. I cut up an unusable 42ft net and eventually made a very usable re-tethered 30ft and 6ft net. Ringing a few birds along the way provided a pleasant interruption to the net building and star bird was a stonking Wood Pigeon. I always get a buzz from catching them.



Wood Pigeon (Columba palumbus) and I look quite slim in this shot.




Wood Pigeon (Columba palumbus)

Totals were:

Starling   11 (1)

House Sparrow   2

Great Tit   1

Goldfinch   1

Chaffinch   1

Coal Tit   1

Blue Tit   (1)

Wood Pigeon 1

Totals   18 (+2 retraps)

Not a bad afternoon after all and hope to put the 6ft single to good use tomorrow.