Third bird from the front... please come forward.There are Black-headed Gulls with proper foreign rings on , down by the Exe. A morning of bread-chucking produced 3 adult Swedish-ringed birds: 2 of which are returning birds from last winter, a Belgian-ringed adult, frustratingly with a bit of dead plant stuck to it's ring and obscuring a number, and a bird of the year from Finland. Some grotty cut & paste-work below for a couple of the rings.
ST241875 and T86?02: Finland and Brussels, respectively. Hopefully will get some data back on them at some point. With any luck...Other bird life knocking around the river was generally much as expected: a Kingfisher whizzed past early on, Grey Wagtails 'zizzicked' along the banks at regular intervals and a steady trickle of migrant Redwings tseeped along overhead. Bird of the day though, had to be a group of five (count 'em!) Black-tailed Godwit feeding busily in the overflow between the Exe and the ship canal, effectively in the city centre. A nice record, if you ask me!
In the time-honoured tradition of going backwards in time, some recent ringing - last weekend at my parents' house we managed to catch a couple of these streaky little beasts:
Meadow PipitAnd the weekend before that, we finished up at Slapton. Not the most prolific end to the season, but a nice female Stonechat (bird of the year - you can just make out the new greater coverts lurking under the edge of the scapulars) - and all in all, a very productive season, with numbers of most species caught showing a healthy improvement on last year.
StonechatAnd the weekend before that, we had our Polterabend. More pictures to come in the fullness of time, but a brief look into the barn from about 10 at night for you here...:
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