A poor forecast for the weekend meant some last minute arrangements were made to try a Friday session.  The wind was a light south-westerly, and overhead cloud resulted in conditions that were not far from ideal.  As has been typical of recent sessions, the first couple of rounds were fairly quiet, and the numbers of birds trapped per round gradually increased over the course of the morning.

A total of 38 birds were captured in 160 feet of net.  The nets were up by 06:45 and were taken down just after 11:00.  The species trapped, and the ratio of new to re-trapped birds (previously ringed individuals) can be seen in the table below.

The highlights of the morning were the first new Cetti’s warbler of the year, a siskin, a couple of bullfinch (including the first newly ringed bird of the year), and three new reed bunting (as this took the annual total to 60 new birds).

The first impression of the Cetti’s warbler in the net was that it was a small bird, almost certainly a female.  It had balled itself up like a wren, and the clear supercilium and small size made it look very like that species on approach.  In terms of wing length and weight the two species can be relatively similar: the Cetti’s warbler had a wing length of 55mm and a weight of 11.0g, while a retrap second calendar year wren, caught during the same session, had a wing of 52mm and a weight of 10.5g. 



Female Cetti’s warbler



Female bullfinch