Saturday 9 August 2014

More swallows

On Wednesday 7th we managed another swallow roost catch at Winterton Marsh and caught 75 new birds this time including a few adults as well as lots of youngsters with just a few which had just fledged. A control came from skokholm where it had been ringed in the next just 19 days ago and was clearly getting ready to leave our shores.
Other species included a number of Reed and Sedge warblers, a single willow warbler and a few reed buntings, in total 15 birds which is a good number for a single net in an hour.  Clearly the marsh is a good place for the marshland acro warblers to fatten up a bit as they migrate through. In 1996  in a month of ringing here we caught several hundred sedge warblers who generally stayed just 2 days and gained around 1.5 gms in that time.  They can put on huge amounts of fat pre long distance migration and weigh around 20gm but we rarely see this here.

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