A simply classic autumn ringer’s day, the ones you dream about! The wind dropped off to hardly anything but
it stayed cloudy allowing us to put in a full day of ringing ending up with a
monster 981 new birds; by far the
star of the show were 854 Goldcrests
caught (a tiny percentage of the actual number of birds which passed through
today!). The meagre totals of other
species caught included a Yellow-browed
Warbler, a Firecrest, 2
Treecreepers, 7 confusing Redpolls (probably Lessers) and 72 Robins.
The factor that made
the Goldcrest numbers even more special was that it wasn’t just a dump of
migrants brought down by the weather conditions it was that they were all
actively and obviously migrating with flocks pouring over the garden even
before it got light in the morning – a
whopping 13,000+ were counted
passing the point through the day with countless birds hitting the buildings on
the tip and getting eaten by Gulls, Sparrowhawks, cats and anything else that
fancied a bite size Goldcrest!
I had literally no
time to look up to see what was passing over the garden through the extremely
busy morning but it was clear that tens of thousands of birds were piling overhead;
as in previous days Chaffinches and Bramblings dominated with 35,000 counted on the point as well as 8,000 Siskins and a Gedser record
breaking 5,900 Mistle Thrushes. I didn’t see much else from the garden but
there did seem to be good numbers of Crossbills heading over with 100+ seen and
heard through my infrequent looks in the sky.
This Redpoll was one of 7 similar birds caught as they looked pretty much like Lesser Redpolls but the adult males amongst them had huge wing lengths up to 76mm which would suggest that they were actually Mealy Redpolls but they went down as Lessers!
Treecreeper
Firecrest
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