Today Heather and I did CES 9 at WWT Llanelli. The CES season so far this year has been an improvement in terms of birds numbers with the corresponding CES visits last year. However migrant numbers have not been as good as we had hoped. It is all probably due to the knock on problems created by the bad breeding season we experienced nationally because of the very wet year back in 2012.
Today was bright and sunny from 6.00am and throughout the day temperatures rose from 16 degrees C to 26 degrees C. There was little or no wind and by about 09.30am the days captures took a dive and were very few. During the morning we caught 20 birds compared with 18 on CES 9 last year.
The breakdown as follows:
Species New Retrapped Total
Dunnock 3 2 5
Blackcap 4 4
Bullfinch 1 1
Wren 4 1 5
Blackbird 1 1 2
Robin 1 1 2
Great Tit 1 1
Totals 15 5 20
We have caught many juvenile Blackbirds this year. Many can be sexed as males, because at the juvenile stage the male grows black tail feathers as in the picture above. The feathers on this bird were very black so it was not mistaken as a male but a few birds we have caught the feathers have not been as black as these so we did not sex them just in case there was the chance they could have been females.
There are three CES sessions left and the next is in the next 11 day window starting from next Sunday 3rd August. At our Gower site the number of juvenile migrants had considerably increased in the last few days so hopefully we will share some of this in CES10.
