Brack - Sun 7 Feb

Plenty of initials in the book today - good to have so many of the RCP crowd join us for the morning and nice to see two groups of interested Brack students through the morning. The weather was mild and still, but teetered on the verge of wet, luckily just holding off enough for us to keep ringing.

The first round produced 23 Yellowhammers, only one of which was a retrap - and nothing else! And in total we caught 37 Yellowhammers through the morning and with such a big team we were able to colour-ring all of them. Our final tally was 76 by noon including a few more Chaffinch again after a notable absence in the last couple of sessions. Of interest were a Blue Tit with 3 old greater coverts and a Great Tit with two. Both species tend to moult all and so these were unusual. We also caught a female Great Tit with particularly washed out plumage tones.

Other things included a single Reed Bunting, Tree Sparrow and Long-tailed Tit and we spent some time looking at the recently published aging and sexing criteria for Yellowhammers and not always finding it matched what we saw! However, we shall keep looking at this in this in the hope of finding a few more helpful pointers.

There were not many other things flying about and a single Meadow Pipit, half a dozen Bullfinch and a handful of Fieldfare and Redwing were the only birds of note. The Funky Welly Award went to Louise.
Pete