Saturday 11 February 2012

How Do You Fit a 20ft Net in a 10ft Gap?

Martin has been getting quite a few Redpolls now coming to his garden feeders of which at least one was bearing a ring, so we decided to try a netting session here.  The only problem was that his garden is only 10ft wide and the birds fly along it rather than across it.  So, how do you fit my smallest net (20ft) in a 10ft gap?  Obviously, you bend it!  This was actually easier than I thought and with the help of a convenient little tear in the net in which to guy off the supporting pole (below), it worked very well.  In the end 33 birds were caught which included 2 Nuthatch, 4 Long-tailed Tit, 8 Robin and 19 Redpolls one of which was a control.  I was assuming that this would be one of this winters birds from Leith Hill, but turned out to be one of Wes Attridge's birds that he ringed in Capel last winter.
Over the rest of the last couple of weeks I did a brief morning in my garden catching 41 new birds including a Great-spotted Woodpecker, six Greenfinch and three Starling, the latter of which I rarely see in the garden.

There were also three mornings spent up on Leith Hill including a couple of ringing demonstrations for different groups of National Trust volunteers and overall caught 96 new birds, still being dominated by Redpolls.  Also a few more controls which were L484304, X786799 and Y169992 (which I also caught in early January).

Birds ringed:
Redpo sp. - 19
Common Redpoll - 66
Lesser Redpoll - 4
Goldfinch - 7
Chaffinch - 5
Blue Tit - 22
Siskin - 7
Robin - 11
Great Tit - 9
Coal Tit - 1
Great-spotted Woodpecker - 1
Starling - 3
Redwing - 2
Long-tailed Tit - 4
Nuthatch - 2
Greenfinch - 6

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