Son of Brass Monkey

Now the weather's changed, here's a couple of pics of some more ringing - this time at a friend's site just north of the moors.

Real field ringing - working out of the back of a car in the frost. Not all cosy heated observatories, you know :o)

A Long-toed Short-toed Treecreeper. Or actually, just a bog-standard Eurasian Treecreeper showing off the fact that it has longer nails than those poxy Short-toed continentals!

Female Fieldfare, last year's young (age 5, in ringing terms)

The weather turned last weekend, so Na and I headed down to Torbay to look for seaduck and purps. We ended up finding ourselves a nice Black-necked Grebe - Na's first in this country - a bunch of Common and a single Velvet Scoter, and a small flock of Eider, before rounding off the day with one of my higher counts of Purple Sandpiper for the county: a whole 20 birds along the breakwater. Here's a couple, with apologies for the image quality, though for hand-held at 1/40th of a second or so, it's not too bad!

Purple Sands. On the rocks.