Sunday 8 July 2012

Big Brother coming to a nest near you!

Over the last few weeks Gillian & I started our nest camera trapping work on our Reed warbler colony. We’re placing cameras at the nests of Reed warblers in the hope of identifying the adults by their colour rings. This is a video of the first nest that we filmed at, containing small chicks. We’re rather pleased that we’re able to identify the female as BTO Pink, Pink Dark Blue. She was ringed at the site as a 3J in 2010, she was recaptured in 2011 and again in 2012. Hopefully with the colour ringing & the cameras we'll be able to follow her nesting attempts over the coming years.

As you can see from the video the male is unringed, but hopefully more trapping over the coming weeks will see him colour ringed! We’re rather excited at being able to film our nests as we never get to see the ‘private’ lives of the Reed warblers and what goes on after we’ve left the nest! With well over 70 nests at the site – we’ve had our work cut out!

This short video is slow to start off with, but you can see some cool/interesting stuff further on….

The above work is being carried out by Gillian for her dissertation.

Excuse the sounds of the planes in this clip! The site sits under the flight path of the UK’s third busiest airport!!!

Saturday 7 July 2012

CANGO & GREGO Catches.

CANGO

Over the past two weeks I’ve been involved in several round-ups targeting moulting geese. These catches taking place at the BTO’s Nunnery Reserve in Thetford and in the Cotswolds Water Park. Good fun as always & very successful – but it was all hands on deck & I didn’t manage to take any photos. All of these round-ups were for separate projects & the Cotswolds Water Park blog, details more information on the round-ups taken place there, this week……

It was good to work with staff from the BTO – my first visit to the Nunnery, which I very much enjoyed! Thanks to Daria for the tour round! & also good to work with FERA & Exeter University teams on the CWP catches…