Three Hundred!!

Sunday, August 27th 2017

Wow!  Amazing!  Tremendous! Fantastic!  Day 12, the last CES of 2017, making this 25 years of CES, and never a day missed.  300 days of CES, ten and a half hours each day and, if I have my sums right, this is 3150 hours of bird ringing.

For once the weather was set fair.  A glorious sunrise covered the reserve and everyone was amazed that our evergreen conifers turned red gold!

Once the sun had risen, they turned green again.

Today was an excellent day.  A total of 47 nets were in operation around the reserve and over 300 birds were processed.  I think we can say that Bullfinches have had a good breeding season, with another 42 new ones receiving their rings.  Siskins are beginning to come back into the reserve and 25 were ringed today.

Early on, two Kingfishers were caught, this one had its photograph taken!

Some Willow Warblers and Chiffchaffs are still on the reserve feeding up before their long journey south.  They weigh less than 10g, as do our resident Goldcrests.

At the other end of the scale is this male Sparrowhawk, about a month out of the nest, weighing over 100g..

There was a photocall of all the ringers.

During the day the ringing room was busy.

We had our delivery of sausage rolls and a cream cake, neither of which lasted long.

At the end of a long day we celebrated with drinks and nibbles.

Tony thanked everyone for their contribution to this milestone of 300 CES days. The 2017 season has been the fourth best in 25 years and today took the total of new birds ringed on the reserve to over 60,000.  The ringers have put up and taken down more than 200Km of nets during the 25 CES years, and walking the nets to check and extract the birds have very conservatively equalled half way around the world!

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