29/10 Greenham Common Feeder

Location: Greenham Common-FDR616
Session: 29/10/2023  07:30 to 11:00hrs
Notes:  I knew we had a busy morning but miss counted how many we had done, thought it was 40 something but it was actually 60 birds processed including 4 from the scrub nets. It would have been more if we hadn’t been rained off around 10:30hrs. Unlike last weekend the number of tits coming didn’t drop after the first net round. I need to do an exercise sometime on the proportion of Blue Tits to Great Tits coming to the feeders over the years as I think so far this year numbers of the latter are down compared to previous winters. Blue Tits so far seem to have had a good breeding outcome which matches this year’s nest box stats. It will be interesting to see if the situation is the same at the other feeders when we start the Winter CES’s in November. The food uptake at the Snelsmore feeder is still not up to “normal”, not sure of the Bagnor feeder as its only been up a couple of weeks. As we were taking the feeder nets down, I could hear a few Goldfinches above us in the trees ready to come down for the niger seed hopefully; the level of seed in this feeder has dropped quite a lot over the last few days, would be nice to ring a few of these and other finches in nearer the numbers we did prior to the  2017/18 winter.
Present: JL,IQ,IW.
Weather: mostly overcast, light breeze, cool, rained off 10:30hrs
Nets: 42M of nets, 18+12M scrub rides, 6M each side of the feeders up from 08:00 to 10:30hrs.
Lures: Feeders with Black Sunflower, Niger, Peanuts.

Recaptures:(07)

Blue Tit                ringed: 06/03/2022, 13/11/2022, 12/02/2023, 22/10/2023

Great Tit              ringed: 29/12/2019, 27/11/2022, 12/02/2023

Sighting: As last week we were kept busy processing the birds etc and must have missed a few. Looks like the female Pheasant that has been feeding below the feeders for the last 10 days or so met an untimely end from the feather found nearby.  A large flock of around 100 Woodpigeons headed west-ish soon after we arrived otherwise not much on the  move.