Two new Carduelis

Post date: Jul 2, 2014 4:51:07 PM

Earlier this week, I went out on a windy afternoon to catch some birds for a malaria project and got two new species for the year: Grasshopper Warbler Locustella naevia and Winchat Saxicola rubetra. There are quite a few around of both species, the latter often feeding fledglings, and I might target them again in the near future to increase our sample size.

Saxicola rubetra

In today's CES session I was on my own again, as my two helpers went for a trip. It started as a very nice, calm and mild morning, but in the last 20 minutes there was a heavy shower and thunderstorm (so I took the nets off even faster than usual!). As expected, there was a further increase in numbers with 54 new birds and 6 retraps of 16 species. Two of these were new for the constant-effort site: Lesser Redpoll Carduelis (flammea) cabaret (adults male and female, possibly paired although they were trapped at different times and in different nets) and Goldfinch C. carduelis (an attractive adult female!). There was also a new Marsh Warbler Acrocephalus palustris, a female with a brood patch score of 4 (so it might have nestlings), and another juvenile Song Thrush Turdus philomelus, but all the others were rather expected. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera and so have no good pictures of these birds!

I'm off to Portugal for a couple of weeks (where I might do some ringing as well), but will return on time for the next CES session.