News Or Three

There’s not much bird news this morning. It was too breezy for ringing on the moss so I went over to Pilling where I found 4 Wheatears and a single Whinchat along the sea wall. I didn’t have any luck with the spring traps but did with the camera, and then only with a Wheatear. The Whinchat image is a relic from a Menorca trip.

Wheatear
Whinchat

Other birds this morning: 80+ Swallows, 2 Kestrel, a Sparrowhawk and a Buzzard. A good number of duck on the wildfowler’s pools with 140 Teal, then 80 Goldfinch and 45 Linnet feeding on the nearby thistle heads along Broadfleet and the sea wall.

By special request there are a couple of pictures of the unremarkable sea “wall” that stretches from Cockerham in the north to Knott End in the south. Strictly speaking the construction is a “bund” – an Asian word for an embankment or dyke that surrounds rice fields or a reservoir and acts as a breakwater to prevent flooding. The first photograph is a view from Pilling to Cockerham with the Pennine hills east of Lancaster in the far distance. The second is a view in the opposite direction. It is not so much the wall that produces the birds, more the variety of habitats like tidal shore, farmland and wooded land that lie on each side of the wall along its several miles.

Pilling view

Below is a view from Lane Ends, Pilling looking south to the distant trees of Fluke Hall. Fluke is a regional name for flatfish, more accurately a flounder, found in the shallow tidal sands of Pilling shore and elsewhere.

Pilling view

With the lack of bird news today I’m posting details of three recent recoveries of our ringed birds, all on them recaptured by other ringers in the UK. The first one comes from the ringing of Siskin in Will’s garden near Garstang during early 2011 when we recorded almost 300 Siskin captures. A second relates to a single Goldfinch from those ringed at Out Rawcliffe in the autumn of 2010 and a third to a Reed Bunting also ringed in the autumn of 2010.

A summary of the Siskin ringing in Will’s garden can be read here , but we now have further evidence of where those early spring migrant Siskins were headed and not surprisingly the destinations included Scotland. Ring number L300924, a Siskin ringed on 16 February 2011 was recaptured a month later on 18 March and then soon after took up its spring migration. Later in the year it was caught by a ringer at Tarbot, Loch Lomond, Scotland on 22 June 2011, 288 kms away from Will’s garden. Of course in June it would be in the throes of the breeding season.

Catterall, nr Garstang to Loch Lomond
Siskin

During the autumn of 2010 during September to November we captured 49 Goldfinch at Rawcliffe Moss where we presumed many of those birds to be from further north. In the case of Goldfinch L300722 it proved of no great distance but typifies the often short movements across Morecambe Bay of this and other species (see the Reed Bunting below).Goldfinch L300722 was first ringed at Out Rawcliffe on 10 November 2010 and then recaptured at Walney Island Bird Observatory on 4 occasions between 7th March and 16th April 2011; after these captures it may have settled down to breed nearby or even moved further away during the later spring and summer. The distance between Rawcliffe Moss and Walney is just 29 kms.

Out Rawcliffe to Walney Island
Goldfinch

A young male Reed Bunting L300408 ringed at Rawcliffe Moss on 7th November 2010 was recaptured in the breeding season of 2011 as an adult male at the RSPB Leighton Moss Reserve on 20th June 2011. This movement is fairly typical of juvenile Reed Buntings in travelling fairly short distances during their first winters, in this case just 34 kms.

Out Rawcliffe to Leighton Moss RSPB
Reed Bunting
Fingers are crossed. The weather looks promising for a ringing session tomorrow.