29/01/12 - 'Catching up'

Well it's been a better week after last weeks frustrations – in that the cold weather and at sometimes freezing conditions appeared to help this week as the duck trap at North Duffield was set and produced a steady number of new birds.

It was set on Thursday (26^th) and despite there being very few ducks using the Top Pond during the day, it caught several new Teal, Wigeon and Mallard the next morning, and has been steadily catching since with just under 30 birds by month end including the first Moorhen and Coot of the year.

The whoosh nets at Bank Island also produced during the week, 5 catches resulting in nearly 40 new Teal, one catch of six birds coinciding with a party of students visiting the reserve as part of our outreach programme. They all got some first hand experience of ringing, seeing Teal in the hand, and helping to let them go – maybe inspired the next generation of ringers in there.

All in all a good duck catching month with totals reaching 156 new birds – including a January record 88 Teal and another 45 Wigeon. In fact this is the second best January total we’ve had – probably due to the mild conditions and lack of flood water throughout the valley, both concentrating birds and allowing us to get to them. 

The reason of course we do all this is not to catch birds and ring them – it’s to get the data back on what they do to help build our knowledge of certain species and aid our conservation management of them. We received a few bits of news this week concerning birds we’ve ringed or controlled in the valley.

Firstly, the Shelduck we controlled in the cannon net catch (GN63293) on 10^th Jan 2012  was originally ringed at Martin Mere WWT on 22/11/05. We’ve had two of our birds ringed in the valley move to Martin Mere WWT in recent years (as well as one to Ireland) so a bit of a east-west movement going on.

The next was initial details on another colour-ringed Ruff being reported in Lancashire – but still awaiting full details.