During the last week or so effort has recently continued to be focused on waterfowl, with up to 8-10 birds being caught most days. Whilst this is still a good daily average it does seem somewhat quiet after those great catches during the colder weather. With Wigeon and Teal starting to depart and now ignoring the grain, the catch is largely comprised of Mallard and Shelduck. Shelduck numbers have now reached 76 birds ringed and 97 handled - so that figure of 100 keeps getting closer! As is typical in March, the first Greylag Geese of the year have been ringed (darvics also attached), three have been caught in the whoosh net at Bank Island, it should have been four but one escaped before we could get there!
So the waterfowl total for the year now stands at 705, so well done & a big thank you to everyone who’s helped so far this year - lots of early mornings & constant trap setting/baiting to keep the birds coming. The last couple of days have now seen the daily catches drop from 8-10 to 1-2 birds so due to this and because we’re in the breeding season that’ll be it for the duck traps now until the Autumn, great whilst it lasted!!
We’ve been hoping to get some wader ringing done in order to get a sample of the breeding wader population colour-ringed to help with research on them in the valley. A short one hour session at North Duffield Carrs produced a single Snipe last week - hopefully more to follow!
Mike caught something abit different in the whoosh net the other day.....a pair of Skylarks that had come up for the little bits of grain that the ducks had left!
Skylark
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