No, it’s not the England cricket team’s latest effort but today’s ringing total from Will’s garden.
More hurried phone calls and weather watching this morning led to a drive up to the Garstang garden for 0800 where the overnight heavy rain was just about petering out, but leaving the paddock in a bit of a muddy mess. Undeterred we put up two nets and caught 101 new birds: 82 Siskin, 16 Chaffinch, 1 Goldfinch, 1 Blackbird and 1 Dunnock. Recaptures were 3 Siskin from recent weeks and 1 Chaffinch.
Last week we thought the Siskin migration had dried up a little but this weekend saw a fresh surge of new birds to the garden area with Will's finch estimates of 200+ Siskin, 100+ Chaffinch, 6 Lesser Redpoll, 15 Goldfinch and 6 Greenfinch. After the morning’s hard graft and observations of birds arriving and leaving we thought today’s count was more like 300+ Siskin, 150+ Chaffinch, 4 Goldfinch, 2 Brambling, 3 Lesser Redpoll and 8 Greenfinch.
Today we looked for visible fat on each Siskin we caught, and a quick perusal of our field sheet shows that roughly 80% of them had fattened up ready for on-going migration. Individual weights varied between a standard and expected 11 grams but several birds tipped the scale at over 15 grams but one large male bounced the balance to 15.7 grams, more akin to the weight of a Goldfinch.
Apologies then that today’s pictures are all Siskin. And now I really must sign off, I have over a hundred birds to enter into IPMR, the BTO ringer’s database.
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